Hank, Have your tried to replicate your customer's problem? We have tested setting the prefix mask in the IP stack in NT 4.0 and it can be set to prefixes longer than 24. cheers, peter
---------- From: Hank Nussbacher[SMTP:hank@ibm.net.il] Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 7:47 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Windows/NT to break the Internet?
How long can the Internet last if every customer needs to get a /24? That is what appears to be with Windows/NT 4.0. This server has lately become very popular with small customers that install an NT server and a few PCs and want a connection. ISPs up to know would assign a /26 or perhaps a /27 or even a /30 to SOHOs like this. Windows NT 4.0 when defining the address range as well as the DNS and inverse - only has space in the form for 3 octets. They assume you are a /24 or larger. I have had customers come back to me and say that they can't even enter the 255.255.255.224 mask I gave them on their system since the NT doesn't support it. Let alone the problems with inverse subnetting that there is a draft RFC out there that almost everyone follows. Seems to have slipped by the people in Oregon, though.
I have been very careful up till now to make optimal use of IP address space but I fear with the plenthora of WinNT 4.0s out there we will see 2% utilization of IP address space in the future.
Am I missing something here on WinNT installs? Or is Microsoft gonna cause the IP address space to expire sooner than we had planned?
Hank Nussbacher IBM Israel