Help about subnet mask needed

Hi

I'm new to all this network stuff so please bare with me. I went and got myself a Toshiba SG20 the IP address is 192.168.1.168 subnet 255.255.255.255 . Now my problem is I can't communicate with the darn thing as I can't set my desktop PCs subnet mask to match the Toshiba. I get an error saying

The Combination of IP address and Subnet mask is invalid. All of the bits in the host address portion of the IP address are set to 1. Please enter a valid combination of IP address and subnet mask.

My question is what would be a valid IP address on a subnet mask of 255.255.255.255, I only want to get in so I can change the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 to match the rest of my network.

Please help as it's doing my head in.

 

There is no valid IP address for a 255.255.255.255 mask. That mask is just for a single host, not a network. In binary it would be all 1s. That means that only that host will match that network address, so there isn't any way to have 2 devices on that address. The subnet mask specifies which hosts are on the network, a 1 in binary is a match, a 0 is ignore, so looking at the last octect .255 would be all 1s. If it was .0 then it would only match the first 3 octets. For example, 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 would have valid hosts of 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254, the first 3 octets would match and the last octet would be ignored.

If you have set the subnet mask on the SG20 to 255.255.255.255 then you will probably have to find out to set it back to the factory default. I think on those it should be 192.168.1.1 with a 255.255.255.0 subnet mask. I would guess look in the manual to see if there is a way to set it back to the default, or call their tech support.

 

I looked on the product support web page for the SG20, it says the procedure for resetting it to factory defaults is on page 264 in the manual.

 

Thanks for that but it looks like I'm screwed at the moment as the only way I can restore back to factory settings is through the SG20 browser. So I'm back to square one as I can't communicate with the SG20 to get to the browser.