[plug] Pet Hates

[Craig Ringer]

Matthew Lambie wrote:

>Another example is
>when networking guys talk in "slash 29" instead of saying "the netmask
>ends in 248" with the intention of looking smarter than you. That really
>annoys me.
>  
>
That latter one is often simply because they're so used to the people 
they talk to knowing what that means that they don't think about it. 
Remember, most networking tools let you write things like:

ip route add 202.111.111.128/29 dev eth0

rather than being forced to write out the full netmask. Frankly, the 
slash notation makes more sense, is more convenient, is easier to 
understand, and the only issue with it in my view is that braindead 
tools can't take it as input. Why do we write out 4 decimal octets - 
which are hard to remember / calculate on the fly - for something that 
can be better expressed by the length of a bitmask?

My point is that they may well simply not realize that not everybody is 
intimately familiar with what that means. However, if you're giving 
someone instructions to type something into a subnet mask field, I'd 
consider it appropriate to give them the value in the required format, 
not expect them to calculate it from their network address and the 
bitmask length. That's just silly for anything but the basic /8, /16, 
and /24 networks (class A/B/C) and even then, you may as well say 
255.0.0.0 (for class A) or whatever. Now, if you ask what to put in the 
subnet mask field and they say "duh, it's a /28, think about it" then 
yep, right with you on the arrogant git annoyance.

--
Craig Ringer