IP address fee??

Fri Sep 6 20:21:12 UTC 2002

On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> The point of communication is to get an idea across; if most of the people you
> communicate with don't understand slash notation, then you use terms they're
> familiar with even if they're imprecise or inaccurate.

That is a very dangerous thing to say (or worse, do).

Being inaccurate too often means it becomes impossible to be precise when
you need to, because the terminology becomes ambigous after being used
wrong all the time.

That doesn't imply you should teach everyone who talks about a "class C"
when they mean a "/24" about CIDR and VLSM, but it's not much harder to
say "Your new class C sized address range is 96.112.30.0 - 96.112.30.255"
rather than "Your new class C net is 96.112.30.0" which is at least
incorrect and maybe even ambigous (then what's the netmask?).

> I think NANOG's ISP-centric membership may skew the perception of our lexicon's
> state.  Most network operators are not ISPs.

Ok, if I connect to their network I'll remove "ip subnet-zero" and "ip
classless" from my configs to revert to the defaults that still reflect
the pre-1993 state of affairs, but if they want to connect to "our"
network, they should play nice and follow the rules we use here.

Iljitsch van Beijnum