Re: 16 year old bug

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> Was [running my house LAN with a noncontiguous netmask], for
> practical purposes, unsupportable?  Was it something likely to cause
> subtle bugs all over the networking stack?  Was it something
> obsoleted more or less 20 years ago?  All yes.

Actually, no.

Unsupportable?  I don't see anything unsupportable about it.  Every
system I tried (which admittedly wasn't all that many) supported it
fine.  Even today, I tried NetBSD 4.0.1 (the most recent I have easy
admin access to) and it appeared to support it as well as whatever I
was using at the time did - though admittedly I didn't actually verify
that packets were routed the way the resulting routing table implied.

Likely to cause bugs?  Nonsense.  Likely to expose existing bugs,
perhaps.  Do you not consider exposing existing bugs a good thing?
I know I certainly do.

Obsoleted 20 years ago?  Perhaps.  Strikes me as pretty functional and
useful for an "obsoleted" feature.  Besides, this _was_ 20 years ago -
well, actually more like 15±5; I didn't have much of a house LAN
before maybe 1991, and I stopped using the address space this was
embedded in sometime around 2000-2001.

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