I would probably suggest one of the 'TEST-NET' address ranges, 'for use in documentation and examples. On the machine where you need this, you can add a drop-only target using an unused address such as the above, for example, iptables -I OUTPUT -d 254.0.0.0/8 -j DROP will ensure anything sent to that 'network' will be silently dropped instead of bothering any gateways, or even causing traffic on the actual network interface.Īgain, you probably don't actually want any of this, even if you think it's convenient - it's not, it's confusing and non-obvious and not a good solution to whatever your problem really is.For example, 254.0.0.1 will never (legally) refer to a real device. It'll do the same as above, but will work even if you use all of the private address ranges already (by having much broader netmasks than necessary, I doubt that you'll have millions of attached devices). You can use an IP address that's reserved for future use (and will probably never be used) that's the old ' Class E' range.For example, if you're only using some parts of 192.168, 10.255.255.1 would be null-routed by your ISP (which would get it thanks to your default gateway). You can use an RFC1918 address that's not in use on your network and rely on your ISP to drop it for you.You don't say what you're actually trying to achieve, so I can't help you do so, but here are some wrong solutions for your problem that would answer your question as you asked it: There's no 'standard blackhole address' as such, nor is there really any requirement for it.

The entire subnet also can be a black hole ( Null route). Nc -vv -l 25 > /dev/null will listen for inbound connections on TCP port 25 and pipe the results to /dev/null. Host with firewall which silently drops packets or variations of it, for example using netcat: (as suggested by ultrasawblade).An IP address which was not assigned to any host.You can setup black hole with firewall by setting it up to silently drop packets ( not reject) from particular (or many) addresses.Īs far as I know there is no such network standard address which will do black hole for you in TCP/IP version 4 (Thanks to Bandrami). It will not happen with UDP and packets will just die while the sending host will not be informed about that. Protocols which keep track of connection state (TCP) can detect a missing destination host. If there are no devices in the network with IP address 192.168.0.10, then this IP address is kind of black hole and it will 'discard' all the traffic to it, simply because it does not exist. There is such a thing as network Black hole.

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