Paul writes:
Second, I've seen Karl and now Alan misuse a term. I'll pick on Alan since his message is right in front of me, but the complaint is general (sorry Alan!):
That was me, actually.
Taking a relatively small chunk of the remaining address space (say, 210.*.*.*) gives us 64k addresses to hand out in convenient
That's 16M addresses, not 64K addresses. We should not equivocate "addresses" and "Class C networks". 210.*.*.* has 2^24 (minus subnet zero and broadcast lossage) addresses -- 16M. 210.*.*.* has 2^16 "Class C networks" -- 64K. We must not assume that every customer will get a Class C -- many will get just a subnet since they will only have a handful of hosts. I know of several providers who are chopping things up on nybble boundaries (16 hosts/net, or actually 14 with the subnet zero and broadcast taken out).
I slipped. It's 64k class C networks. I know better, but yesterday was a long day. If all the router vendors supported nybble-sized routing, things would be a lot easier for providers. If there was an easy named db syntax to fix in-addr mapping syntax for nybble-sized routing, things would be a lot easier for providers. Paul can perhaps fix one of these issues (in his copious spare time? 8-), the other one is a more general problem. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com