The installation menu provides a prototype network number made from the logical AND of your IP address and your netmask. If the user types in the wrong netmask or overrides the prototype network number (which I think is what happened here), they can get an incorrect value. I'll have to look at this when I get home, I'm not in front of my Debian system.
Netmasks, by the way, can legitimately have zeroes in less than all 8 bits of the last octet. They should, however, have zeroes in one or more low-order bits, and we could check for that. Thanks Bruce On Wed, 12 Jun 1996, Rick Hawkins wrote: > Under the beta releases with 1.3.9x, the following file is created: > > #! /bin/sh > ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 > route add 127.0.0.1 > IPADDR=129.186.31.38 > NETMASK=255.255.255.0 > NETWORK=129.186.31.38 > BROADCAST=129.186.31.255 > GATEWAY=129.186.31.254 > ifconfig eth0 ${IPADDR} netmask ${NETMASK} broadcast ${BROADCAST} > route add -net ${NETWORK} > route add default gw ${GATEWAY} metric 1 > > these last two lines simply aren't working with the variable names. I > added Gerry: > The reason the last "route add -net ${NETWORK}" is not working is that it > is expecting a network address (ending in .0) and it is getting a host > address instead.