This article currently contains strange paragraphs like

"A network mask, also known as a subnet mask, netmask or address mask, is a 32-bit bitmask used to tell how much of an IP address identifies the subnetwork the host is on and how much identifies the host."

Which is, of course, completely false in the general sense. Has the author not heard of IPv6 for example?

... which raises this question: Should this article really have anything to do with specific protocols, or should it just be an explanation of the term subnetwork with pointers to specific articles about IPv4 subnetting etc? We already have the IPv4 subnetting reference so that seems logical to me.

I would understand links to specific articles from here (such as one for IPv4 subnetworks and another for IPv6 subnetworks), but this seems a bit illogical. How about lifting protocol-specific material out to the revelant articles and pointing to them?

When e.g. IPv6 becomes more common, we'd otherwise have to include that one here as well to be consistent. It's of course another option, but again, we already have a specific IPv4 article for this -- why not use it better? Just a thought. :-) Jugalator 18:39, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)

My primary reason for clustering them together was too many sub-stub-articles were created as a result, all of which were being pointed to by different articles, usually intending the same (IP specific) idea (Ex: Subnet, subnet address, subnetting, subnetwork, Classful network). I just took the vast (and often quite vague) array of IP-Specific Subnetting articles, and crammed them into one larger, easier to understand page.

The protocol-specific information could be difficult to remove, since different protocols handle subnetting differently (if at all), and reducing it to an explanation of what subnetting means, might again reduce it to a stubby dicdef.

Still remaining is a slew of other articles on the topic Internet_Protocol, IP address, IPv4 subnetting reference as well as IPv4, IPv4 address exhaustion and IP address allocation to boot.

We could simply rename the article to something like IPv4 Subnetting (IMHO adding the word "reference" may be a bit too verbose), make a redirect, and hope that someone working on one of the other (poor, abandoned) Network protocol pages (like AppleTalk, IPX or *gasp* Xerox_XNS) makes an appropriate disambiguation page if nessecary. Gamera2 06:28, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Follow up

It seems as though IPv4 and maybe IPv6 (The same thing, minus a few extra features and changes for the sake of easy conversion), are the only two protocols that use "subnetting" in the flexable sense. All the other protocols (or at least the ones anyone knows anything about, can't speak for BanyanVINES myself), appletalk or IPX for example, don't seem to support any kind of masking past the pre-set network half of the address (for obvious reasons). If someone wants to put in a paragraph (or change the top one accordingly) to describe network/host halfs of logical addresses, then they're more than welcome to do that. Maybe add tidbits about how it's handled in IPv6, etc. - Gamera2 18:23, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I started to try and clean this article up before I saw all this. I don't think we should have separate article for IPv4 and IPv6 subnetting - after CIDR they are now close enough in mechanism that there's no point. It would result in several tiny pages - something the Internet Protocol area has enough problems with already. IPv4 subnetting has a lot of history IPv6 subnetting doesn't have, but other than that they are now the same. If people want to split this page up, and have a page called "IP subnetting", that would be fine - but the remaining material on the subnet page would only be a few sentences.

As for the Internet Protocol mess, I've been working on cleaning individual pages up, but we could probably use some rational design of how many pages we're going to have, and what's in each. Do we want to start a WikiProject page to coordinate this, rather than having comments scattered here and there on various Talk: pages? Noel 02:57, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In

"Network address 204.4.32.0 Decimal = 11001100.00000100.00100000.00000100 Binary"

shouldn't the last eight digits be all zero?

Snip 14:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Noel (talk) 17:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Putting this here as data for anyone who cares:

The first mention of subnets, in the sense of subdivisions of a classful network, that I know of in Internet documentation occurs in IEN-82, "LCS Net Address Format", from February, 1979. (MIT was using subnets some years before anyone else.) This subnetting scheme, as eventually adopted by the Internet, was more fully described by Jeff Mogul in RFC 917, "Internet subnets", in October 1984.

The notion of subnet masks has to be credited to Dave Moon, though, I think. Although the early LNI hardware supported masks, we didn't really think of using them in the protocol; it was Dave Moon, at an early meeting on an otherwise forgotten piece of technogical detritus named 'MUPPETS' (the name is a play on PARC Universal Packet) - an attempt to deal with the multiplicity of protocol suites inside MIT at the time - who made the mask suggestion at the protocol level, and it was carried forward to Mogul's paper. Noel (talk) 17:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I consider myself fairly technically savvy, but I’m no network admin. I found this article is highly technical and presents more theory rather then explanations. I might suggest it’s a challenging for anyone to understand this who doesn't already have an extensive knoweldge of networking terminology. I found the external link to the about.com article far more effective at describing what subnetworking really is with better examples. --Trode 18:31, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that. I was trying to leave it pretty simple, but I'm sure it can be dumbed down some more. Taking too much away from the article would leave a lot of room for explanation, but simplifying the basics at the start would probably help. Strip away too many of the details and it becomes little more than an overglorified dicdef. Math articles tend to have the same problem. --Gamera2 20:59, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]