Re: Brokenness in parsing of pg_hba.conf

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Greg Stark wrote:
>  
>
>>    a.b.c
>>
>>      When a three-part address is specified, the last part shall be interpreted
>>      as a 16-bit quantity and placed in the rightmost two bytes of the network
>>      address. This makes the three-part address format convenient for specifying
>>      Class B network addresses as "128.net.host" .
>>    
>>
>
>I can understand the a.b case, but the a.b.c case is just weird.  What
>logic is there that it is a.0.b.c?  Nothing I can think of except
>convention.  I agree with Vixie that this syntax is strange and
>shouldn't be encouraged.
>  
>

The mentioning of Class B network addresses proves that this is a 
convention from ancient times, when a couple of network admins where 
using up all A and B networks and didn't want to write all those ".0" 
indicating their waste of address space...

Its usability nowadays is very limited, and should be avoided for 
clarity reasons.

Regards,
Andreas