Re: Summary: what to do about INET/CIDR

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Tom Lane wrote:

> Alex Pilosov <alex@pilosoft.com> writes:
> > Also, I agree with Larry that cidr _must_ be printed with 4 octets in
> > them, whether they are 0 or not. (i.e. it should print 207.158.72.0/24)
> 
> > This is the standard way of specifying addresses in all network equipment.
> > RFC specifies that, just the library that we use doesn't (yes, it is from
> > Vixie, but it doesn't make it RFC-compliant)
> 
> Somehow, I am more inclined to believe Vixie's opinion on this than
> either yours or Larry's ;-)

> If you think there is an RFC that demands the above behavior and not
> what Vixie recommended to us, let's see chapter and verse.

After a long search of RFCs, I could not find any that _mandates_ one way
over the other in all situations. However, in all RFC, whenever an example
of IP addressing is used, the full (10.0.0.0/8) address is used far more
often than compacted (10/8).

I'd give you an example of BIND9, but in its inet_ntop function, it no
longer has the netmask length ;)

All networking software supports full syntax of address. Most of
networking software supports compacted syntax.

Many RFCs relating to the networking software, DO specify that full
version is required:
ftp://ftp.merit.edu/internet/documents/rfc/rfc2622.txt 
ftp://ftp.merit.edu/internet/documents/rfc/rfc2673.txt verse 3.2.1

RIPE NCC (the european version of ARIN) also likes the complete version in
their standards documents (refer:
http://www.lir.garr.it/docs/ripe-121.txt across the document

ARIN in their allocation templates, also uses full version: 
(again, across the document)
http://www.arin.net/regserv/templates/isptemplate.txt
http://www.arin.net/routingreg/route.html
http://www.arin.net/routingreg/route-set.html


If this doesn't persuade you, I think I'll just ask Vixie to settle this.
:)

-alex

> FWIW, the direction we seem to be converging in is that INET will always
> print all four octets.  Maybe the answer for you is to use INET, rather
> than to try to persuade us that you understand CIDR notation better than
> Vixie does...