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I've logged in to my router's console to check a small internet problem.

And accidently noticed a strange ip connected to the wireless network which is 169.254.70.177 (the rest were all on the 192.168.1.0/24),

I looked that ip up on whois and got nothing, result was that 'this ip is unroutable'.

What does that mean ? and why possibly would be seeing this strange ip on my local network ?

This ip was appearing as connected to the router via wireless network, a few seconds later it appeared as connected via ethernet.

Can someone please explain what could this possibly happen ?

T.Galisnky
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  • See _[RFC 3927, Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927)_. – Ron Maupin Apr 24 '18 at 01:32
  • Thank you very much, I would have marked this as an answer if I could. – T.Galisnky Apr 24 '18 at 01:35
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    Well, it is off-topic here. You should ask such question on [networkengineering.se] or [sf] for a business network, or on [su] for a personal network. [so] is for programming questions. This question is probably going to be closed as off-topic here. – Ron Maupin Apr 24 '18 at 01:37

2 Answers2

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The 169.254.0.0/16 address range is the "zeroconf" range that many devices fall back to when no local address is configured and DHCP fails.

It's a link-local address, meaning that devices can only communicate within the local layer 2 segment. These addresses are not routed.

The device in question is probably set up for DHCP but failing that (filtered, exhausted pool, ...) has fallen back to zeroconf. Another possibility is a stray packet that the device has sent out on the wrong interface.

Using packet capturing, you should be able to find out the device's MAC address and be able to locate it.

Zac67
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  • This is the right answer. Probably an issue with DHCP (99% of the time) causing this range of address to be used. As mentioned by Zac, do a packet capture and see where it fails. Alternatively if you can use a static address that should make things easier. – mr4kino Apr 24 '18 at 11:58
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The 192.168.X.X Ip's are the ones being assigned by your router, they are private network reserved addresses. The other address you see is probably your router's connection to the WAN

Randy.Muffman
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