At 14:47 10/16/96 UTC, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

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. -----snip----- Am I missing something here on WinNT installs? Or is Microsoft gonna cause the IP address space to expire sooner than we had planned?

You're missing something. On the DNS issue, I would agree with you that their implementation has some serious shortcomings. On the other issue, I think there's something wrong with your customers. I have a computer on my home network running Windows NT 4. It's not a /24 network, it's a /29, and NT4 accepts a .248 netmask without any problem. -- William S. Duncanson NeoSoft Operations william@neosoft.com (888) NEOSOFT or (713) 968-5800