On Monday 29 October 2018 07:18:44 Michael Stone wrote: > On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 08:18:44PM +0300, Reco wrote: > >On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 12:56:13PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > >> The definition for netmask I find in that section is > >> netmask mask > >> Netmask (dotted quad or CIDR) > >> > >> which at a glance would lead me to expect a full CIDR-format > >> address (e.g., 192.168.1.1/24) here. That would clearly seem > >> redundant with the address field immediately above, but I don't > >> know of anything else that's consistent with CIDR notation. > > > >I agree that this part of the manpage is in dire need of good > > wording. I'd replace it with "Netmask (dotted quad or number of > > bits, eg 24)", because that's how it actually works.
Absolutely. Where I may have gone aglay is in assumeing the slash was part of it, perhaps as a switch to tell that 24 valid bits were assumed. And amazingly to me, I read that RFC, and did not encounter the "netmask 24" syntax anyplace in it. In any event I think all my machines use the dotted quad representations. Because of network managers love for tearing down a working network, and leaving the scene w/o building a new working linkage, I have always: composed my own eth0 stanza's in /e/n/i made them immutable so nm is powerless to tear it down composed my own resolv.conf as a real file this machine for instance: nameserver 192.168.##.1 search coyote.den nameserver and made it immutable so nm can't attempt to change it. With a hosts file based local net, I need no local dns setups at all. > Mostly the netmask field should be considered a legacy interface. > Historically, the address was only the address, and the netmask was > the dotted-quad formatted netmask for that address. When ifupdown > gained the ability to specify the address field in address/bits format > (in wheezy), the netmask field was extended to also recognize cidr > bits in addition to dotted quad. (This also provides symmetry with > the ipv6 > representation, where dotted quad doesn't make sense.) With the new > address syntax the netmask field is fully redundant, but remains for > upgrades and compatibility with old scripts/etc. And you insist it can't work, and it has been here for years. All the immutable bits were required because years ago, nm was so intertwined with everything that it could only be removed with a root session of rm. More recently it can be removed w/o destroying the OS. I'd offer thanks and a cold one to whomever fixed it so it could be removed. What you need to learn, instead of insisting it can't work, is that theres more than one way to skin a cat. My recommendation is that the first step is to make sure its dead. -- Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>