[SUMMARY/NEW PROBLEM] Accomodating VLSM subnets in Solaris 8 ...

From: Bryan J. Smith (b.j.smith@ieee.org)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 16:55:31 EST


Quoting "Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>:
> [ My apologizes in advance if this is answered in a FAQ somewhere. ]
> Limitation (Assumed for Solaris 8):
> - /etc/inet/netmasks only supports non-CIDR netmasks (/8, /16, /24)
> Problem:
> - My subnet is a CIDR (/26).

First off, I used CIDR when I meant as shorthand for VLSM (I use the two terms
far too interchangably). So when I wrote "/26" I meant it as shorthand for
"255.255.255.192" (which is in my /etc/inet/netmask).

Secondly, an endless number of people (wow!) have E-mailed off-list and stated
that Solaris 8 does, in fact, support VLSM netmasks in /etc/inet/netmask. Okay,
that's good to now confirm.

Which brings me to why I made that incorrect assumption.

Because 1) my /etc/inet/netmasks already has:
   XX.YYY.ZZ.64 255.255.255.192
   [ Where IP = XX.YYY.ZZ.71 and ZZ = class A ]

And 2) after a Google search that came back with several pages that said SunOS 5
doesn't support CIDR/VLSM in /etc/inet/netmasks (I'll now assume those are dated
/ for older SunOS 5.x versions).

So I incorrectly assumed the previous administrator** overlooked this and that
was the root cause.

I'm going to have to check to see where and why the above /etc/inet/netmask is
not working on my system. I'll further summarize why it didn't work. If anyone
has any suggestions, please let me know. Thanx.

-- Bryan

**NOTE: I just changed employers and caught this nagging issue off-the-bat
where select clients could not connect to this one Solaris system's web services
(because they were all using the same major carrier as I quickly discovered ;-).
 netstat -r was reporting XX.0.0.0 as the subnet and ifconfig was reporting
ff000000 as the mask with XX.255.255.255 as the broadcast address. Sure enough,
a quick "ifconfig set XX.YYY.ZZ.71 netmask 255.255.255.192 broadcast
XX.YY.ZZ.127" took care of the problem completely (can't belive my new employer
had been putting up with this little issue for that long -- the previous admin
blamed it on Solaris!).

-- 
Bryan J. Smith     (suffix-free title for your protection)
mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org             http://www.thebs.org
----------------------------------------------------------
   community : free will          communism : will free
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:26:06 EDT