nanog mailing list archives

Re: ISP customer assignments


From: Joe Abley <jabley () hopcount ca>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:14:59 -0400


On 2009-10-13, at 08:05, Scott Morris wrote:

While I may agree that teaching classful routing is stupid, the
addressing part lets people start getting the concept of binary.

That's true of classless addressing, too. When students have problems with non-octet bit boundaries, that just means you start with mask lengths that are multiples of 8.

While
I'd love to think that people coming out of the school system have a
grasp of simple mathematical skills, more and more I'm finding that's
not the case. I wouldn't spend a LOT of time with it, and I certainly
wouldn't LEAVE at classful addressing, but it's a foundational step.

Why is the presumption faulty?

You were suggesting that classful addressing is reasonable to teach because it's simpler. It's not simpler, and in a modern-day context it's just wrong.


Joe


Current thread: