Eric. "Greg Ewing" <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Nick Coghlan wrote:

...

Or, to put it another way, given an arbitrary host in a network (e.g. your own machine or the default gateway) and the netmask for that network, calculate the network address.

Some people have claimed that the gateway address of a network isn't necessarily the zero address in that network. If that's true, then you *can't* calculate the network address from a host address and a netmask -- there isn't enough information. Furthermore, an IPNetwork object needs to be able to represent a network address whose address part contains bits that aren't in the mask.

I don't see why that would be considered a network address, then. It sounds to me like that's a host address plus a netmask.