Check out this email....[Fwd: The next big thing for websites]

[Derek Broughton]

charlie derr wrote:

> 
> 
> Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> LOL.  It _is_ a little scary until you see what really happened.  Try
>> opening the URL with wget (or you could just use nslookup on the host,
>> but it's not as interesting).
>> 
>> www.ulwebnet.com has an IP of 0.0.0.0 - so it's always going to resolve
>> to
>> your system.  There's nothing here to be afraid of, move along folks :-)
> 
> 
> I confess that is pretty nifty.  Interestingly enough I get 3 different
> behaviors with respect to that "special" address on 3 different 0Ss.
> 
> If i try to ping www.ulwebnet.com from a freeBSD machine, I get a ping
> return from the Layer 3 switch on the network it's plugged into (the
> gateway address).  On a debian linux machine I get a ping return from
> localhost.  On windows XP pro I get:  "Destination specified is invalid."
> and no ping attempt actually seems to be sent towards 0.0.0.0
> 
> for whatever it's worth,

All of which are possible.  You could, probably, get at least the last two
from any of those OS's.  The first probably depends partly on the switch
and partly your routing table.  Whether 0.0.0.0 maps to localhost or an
invalid address would depend on the netmask in the routing table.
-- 
derek