Problem pinging IPs with 3 digits in all octets

13 Feb 2009 2:11 PM

Allyn

I'm dealing with a vendor that claims his application requires Windows to
handle 3 digits in all octets of the IP address, and consequently this is the
reason his application is not working. I've tried the following on multiple
machines, from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008. They all respond the same.

========
C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 192.168.001.025

Pinging 192.168.1.21 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.21: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=59
....
========
C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 172.016.002.001

Pinging 172.14.2.1 with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
....
========
C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 010.025.100.001

Pinging 8.21.100.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
....
========

I did a packet capture, and the packets are leaving all Windows systems with
the incorrect IP address. That is, the ARP requests are not correct initially.

For whatever reason, the vendor is able to get the systems to ping properly,
but I have access to several networks and none work.

I'm very curious if this is widespread and if anyone has an explanation. I'd
say the leading 0's should not impact anything, so to me I'd rate is as a
noncritical Windows network bug.

Thank you.

13 Feb 2009 8:02 PM

Michael W. Ryder

Allyn wrote:
Show quoteHide quote

> I'm dealing with a vendor that claims his application requires Windows to
> handle 3 digits in all octets of the IP address, and consequently this is the
> reason his application is not working. I've tried the following on multiple
> machines, from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008. They all respond the same.
>
> ========
> C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 192.168.001.025
>
> Pinging 192.168.1.21 with 32 bytes of data:
>
> Reply from 192.168.1.21: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=59
> ...
> ========
> C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 172.016.002.001
>
> Pinging 172.14.2.1 with 32 bytes of data:
>
> Request timed out.
> ...
> ========
> C:\Documents and Settings\ABaskerville>ping 010.025.100.001
>
> Pinging 8.21.100.1 with 32 bytes of data:
> Request timed out.
> ...
> ========
>
> I did a packet capture, and the packets are leaving all Windows systems with
> the incorrect IP address. That is, the ARP requests are not correct initially.
>
> For whatever reason, the vendor is able to get the systems to ping properly,
> but I have access to several networks and none work.
>
> I'm very curious if this is widespread and if anyone has an explanation. I'd
> say the leading 0's should not impact anything, so to me I'd rate is as a
> noncritical Windows network bug.
>
> Thank you.

If you look at the output of the ping command you can see one of your
problems. Putting a leading zero in a number tells ping that the number
is an octal number so 016 is treated as 016 octal or 14 decimal. If you
converted your addresses to octal before entering them in ping this may
fix part of your problem -- i.e. 16 decimal is 020 octal.