legacy /8

Sat Apr 3 00:20:58 UTC 2010

On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 03:46:55PM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
> The expectation was that those /8s would be subnetted into vast arrays of "Class C" sized chunks and that subnets within a given /8 all had to be the same size (this used to be necessary to keep RIP happy and every machine participating in RIP routing had to have an /etc/netmasks (or equivalent) table that tracked "THE" subnet mask for each natural prefix).

	er, again, not true. the space was originally, net/host - the mantra was "bridge where 
	you can, route when you must" - there were expected to be a few networks with millions
	of hosts within each broadcast domain.  (anyone else remember the ARP storms of the 
	1970s/1980s?)

	routing came into its own later, along with classful addressing.

> Owen
> 

--bill