Re: inet address mib issue

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

Apologies if this is a duplicate. I seem to have a stuck mail server in San 
Jose, and I'm resending some stuff I think may be in it.


At 08:49 AM 5/4/00 +0200, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
>Make arbitrary address masks really sense with IPv6?

the thing to have instead of the mask is a prefix length. We have been 
using prefix lengths in place of masks since the deployment of BGP-4 in 
1994, as the only cogent use of random-bit masks was in Kampai Addressing, 
and we didn't deploy that. Using a 16 byte octet string when a one byte 
integer makes a lot of sense.

That said, it sounds like you are arguing for a structured value:

         CHOICE {
         ip4Address: address OCTET STRING(4)
                     length  INTEGER(0..32)
         ip6Address: address OCTET STRING(16)
                     length  INTEGER(0..128)
         }

with that, you could define a prefix in an arbitrary way, and when you want 
just an IP Address, you set the length to 32 or 128.

Yes, I know I'm a heretic, mentioning structured values. It's just that 
sometimes they are so obviously the way to go, and I have never figured out 
the religious argument against them...