ISP customer assignments

Tue Oct 13 12:14:59 UTC 2009

On 2009-10-13, at 08:05, Scott Morris wrote:

> While I may agree that teaching classful routing is stupid, the
> addressing part lets people start getting the concept of binary.

That's true of classless addressing, too. When students have problems  
with non-octet bit boundaries, that just means you start with mask  
lengths that are multiples of 8.

> While
> I'd love to think that people coming out of the school system have a
> grasp of simple mathematical skills, more and more I'm finding that's
> not the case.    I wouldn't spend a LOT of time with it, and I  
> certainly
> wouldn't LEAVE at classful addressing, but it's a foundational step.
>
> Why is the presumption faulty?

You were suggesting that classful addressing is reasonable to teach  
because it's simpler. It's not simpler, and in a modern-day context  
it's just wrong.

Joe