You have been tasked by the network team to assign a server a new static IP address. When you try to apply the IP 172.256.1.15 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0, the system returns an error. What is causing the error?
172.x.x.x is a Class B address but the subnet mask is the default for Class A.
The DHCP server is not assigning an IP address, so the computer generated an APIPA address.
There is not enough information provided to determine the problem.
In IPv4 each octet is 8 bits, so its decimal value must be between 0 and 255. Because the second octet in 172.256.1.15 is 256, the address is syntactically invalid and the operating system rejects it. APIPA addresses (169.254.x.x) are unrelated because you are manually configuring a static IP. Likewise, DHCP plays no role in this manual assignment, and there is no requirement that a Class B network (172.x.x.x) use its historical default subnet mask (255.255.0.0); using a Class A mask with a Class B address is legal but uncommon. Therefore, the only real problem is the invalid octet value.
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