Hi Alef,

Which part is getting you confused?

One of the most important things to be aware of is that a wildcard mask is
not just an inverted network mask.

A rule regarding netmasks is that when looking at it as a binary sequence it
has to be a bunch of consecutive 1s and 0s, as soon as the first 0 appears,
the following digits must continue to be 0

For a wild card mask, the above concept does not apply, 1s and 0s can be in
any order.   The binary sequence of the wild card mask has a meaning that a
0 means, the value of this bit much match, where a 1 means, I don't care
what the source value is and is therefore an implied match.

To give a simple example, say you are in OSPF and have an interface
192.168.1.1/24 that you wish to enable.

You could be most specific and do

router ospf 1
 network 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 area 0

or more general and do

router ospf 1
 network 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.255 area 0

I guess you could just go directly to the interface and do "ip ospf 1 area
0" but that kind of sidelines the use case here, so lets ignore that for the
time being :)

in both cases OSPF would be enabled for the interface, however if you wanted
to have the most direct control, specifying the complete address and using
an exact wildcard mask ensures that only that interface gets activated.  For
example if I renumbered the interface on 192.168.1.1/24 to
192.168.1.111/24in the first case OSPF would be disabled for the
interface and the later it
would not since the IP still matches the wildcard mask.

There are also interesting things you can do with ACLs to match multiple
non-consecutive IP addresses by use of an interesting wildcard mask, these
rely on a base IP address and a wildcard string that relies on must
match/don't care values for the binary string.

Is that of any help?

Cheers,
Adam


On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Alef <[email protected]> wrote:

> Does anyone have any recommendations for a good tutorial on wildcard masks?
> I know the one on the ipexpert site, i'm afraid i need some more material to
> digest if possible ;-)
> i'm somewhere in between getting it and not getting it i think
> thanks,
> alef
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