On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Steve Camas wrote:

...

Please don't. This list isn't for primary school IP networking homework questions.

So I guess this list is *actually* for self-righteous people to say mean and nasty things to people who come looking for help. If this man walked up to you at a conference and asked such a question, would you be this rude? I think not. If you say, "yes", I am please to hear this as you will not live long -- someone will beat you to death.

Are you always this rude to people on public mailing lists?

Perhaps the 60 seconds spent looking up the address above would have been better spent answering the man's question and *politely* telling him this list is not the right place to ask such things.

You want polite answers? Then pay me $150/hr and I'll give you polite answers.

Please see Patrick's (patrick@ianai.net) response for an example of how to answer the question without being a jerk.

Seems to me that Patrick's answer contained less useful information than mine which you carefully snipped off your reply. Here it is again: P.S. You might want to refer to some RFCs as well http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2072.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1812.html Note that I didn't just refer to "some RFC" or "RFC 1812 and 2072" but I actually took the time to dig up working URLs to the two RFCs. They talk about CIDR and state quite definitively that all-ones and all-zeroes subnets are allowed. P.P.S. You're probably right but if you can't make the customer's equipment work and you can't back up your claims with reference to a higher authority, then you gotta be crazy. Of course, what is allowed and what works are two different things. And if the customer's router will not work as defined in RFC1812 then it will help the guy immensely if he can point to the higher authority of the RFC so that the customer realizes quite definitively that it is the customer's equipment that is broke, not the ISP that is broke. At this point if our ISP is smart he will work around the problem maybe by giving the customer a couple of /26's or selling them a better router or... You better get used to jerks on mailing lists because there are *LOTS* of us out there, often providing useful technical info along with our rude comments. Maybe your worst nightmare is the class clown who grew up to be a geek but some people just snicker at our antics and go on to the next message. And that's the way life oughta be. -- Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com