TL;DR - we'd like someone to add warnings to ifconfig etc. if no netmask is supp...

Lammy · on July 19, 2020

That's not a very good summary at all. Most of the article is on the history/evolution of Internet addressing.

iso1631 · on July 19, 2020

Either way it's not a story of someone actually building a single broadcast domain with millions of hosts on

sn · on July 19, 2020

It's not a summary by number of words, but it if someone doesn't want to read the article, it's what I want them to be aware of.

It's frustrating the number of silly things you can do at the command line that persist for backwards compatibility reasons. But we can at least add warnings for them. It would have been much better for the user to have been told at the time they failed to add a netmask that they made a mistake. It would have removed the need for the support ticket entirely (at least, one hopes so.)

mkswap is another example of this. Karel Zak had thoughtfully added warnings in swapon already if you enabled swap with insecure permissions https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.g... but nobody had bothered to warn at the time the swap file was actually created. So I had someone add that: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.g...

gnu8 · on July 19, 2020

Maybe just default to /24. That is a fairly sensible default and anyone who wants something different should be smart enough to specify a mask.