FYI. Hank -------------forwarded message------------

I have to apologize for the lack of clarity since I was getting the reports from customers. The problem is NOT in setting a prefix mask. The problem is with inverse for subnets. From the install notes of Windows/NT (DNS and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0) dated May 12, 1996 (page 28), under the section 'Configuring Reverse Lookup' the doc says, and I quote:

??? I haven't a clue. I think there is a bug???

end quote.

First of all, from the date this would have been the NT4 *beta2* release notes, not the final release. Please ask your customer what the final release notes say -- I assume they are cleaned up somewhat. Secondly, having looked into this a bit what I've found is that there is a limitation in the DNS Administrator -- the GUI tool that front-ends our DNS server -- where you can't enter a value in reverse DNS corresponding to the smaller subnet. However, we read BIND-compatible files and if you enter the right values in the ASCII file then it works fine (according to the developer who wrote it, anyway :-). So you're really no worse off with NT than with UNIX, you only loose the ability to use the nice GUI admin if you need this feature. We'll fix the admin UI in the next NT release. Thanks. Mark Ryland Developer Relations Group Microsoft Corporation markry@microsoft.com