Also sprach Mike Storjohann
The mask on the Hiper ARC is /24. On with the dispute! I am learning a lot from the discussion so keep it up!
Yeah...I went back and found that in your original message. :) Really, its a question of most-specific route wins...this really is the whole concept of classless routing. You could have a whole nest of routes, a /24, a /28, a /29, a /30, and a /32 if you really wanted. When you have a packet to route, you find the most specific (netmask with the most ones, or highest number if you're using the /24 type notation) route that includes the IP address for the packet that you're routing and use that route/next-hop. When you have that next-hop, you look for where you send that next-hop...so if you have a route 10.1.1.9/32 with a next-hop of 10.1.1.12, you forward the packet to 10.1.1.12. Of course, to find out where 10.1.1.12 is, you...have to do a route lookup. :) Eventually, you find a next-hop that is directly connected, which gives you the interface to use, at which point you go looking in other locations for how to send the packet (for ethernet you go looking in the arp table for a MAC address, if its a point-to-point interface, you just fire the packet out the interface for the other side to pick up). So, there really is nothing magical about directly connected routes (or there *shouldn't* be at least), other than the fact that they give you an interface for the next-hop rather than another IP address (some systems represent this by putting the IP address assigned to the interface as the next-hop address, some just put the interface name in there). Basically, the same rules of picking the most-specific route still apply, even if the more specific route is a static route, and the less specific route is a directly connected. Of course, we could get really funky and start talking about tunnels, where the "interface" is really a logical construct that takes you into other processing that eventually comes back and does more route table lookups and starts the whole process over again...but that's getting off the subject. :) -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456 - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.