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From: mogul@SU-NAVAJO.ARPA (Jeff Mogul)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Subnetting and gateways
Message-ID: <8512130034.AA05222@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 12-Dec-85 18:11:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8512130034.AA05222
Posted: Thu Dec 12 18:11:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Dec-85 20:02:00 EST
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Approved: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa

I disagree that requiring RFC950-style subnet support is a bad
idea.  If implemented reasonably, using address masks, it
insulates a host entirely from the addressing format (i.e.,
subnets? and if so, what bits specify the subnet?)  So, rather
than moving the smarts into the hosts, RFC950 goes in the
opposite direction - put a simple mechanism into each host that
allows it to offload all the smarts onto the gateways.

Of course, even this much change is probably too much for some
of our vendors.  But the internet is too big to pretend that
subnets are unnecessary.

-Jeff

P.S.: I believe Noel Chiappa has consistently advocated the position
that non-gateway hosts should not even have routing tables;
just a large enough redirect table (with host redirects only)
and the address of one or more neighbor gateways.