>There appears to be a lot of confusion over PortMasters and netmasks,
>but there's one simple rule that should make it easier to understand:
>All our products support ONE netmask per network. We expect a network
>to be sliced up the same way, which is another way of saying that we
>don't do variable length subnet masks. We will do VLSM in the future
>(its one of the Big Four Requests).
As an ISP, I always break my class C blocks using the same netmask, not
enough hardware supports VLSM. The bigger problem is colapsing the
subnet/netmask back into the .0 network for RIP broadcasts, i.e.
204.178.201.64 (255.255.255.224) will broadcast a route for 204.178.201.0 to
the portmaster.
If a connecting network broadcast an appropriate RIP route, all works fine,
but if the connecting network does not or can not broadcast RIP (such as
windows NT), then the route fails. This also causes problems if I want
subnets to go to different portmasters.
The only current way to route traffic to an NT (or other non RIP) gateway is
by entering a route for each host on the destinantion network in the
portmaster.
Mike