Joe <j...@jretrading.com> writes:
> Indeed so, it is even in a folder called 'etc', which I think is in a
> 'drivers' folder. It's a while since I used it. There may be an
> existing default or example \etc\hosts file. The LMHosts file is also
> here, but of interest only to Windows networks for speeding up share
> lookups.
>
> --
> Joe
My thanks to all who replied and thanks for reminding me of some
of the considerations one needs to think of when setting this all
up since that's what I used to do as part of my job before
retiring in 2015. As for there being 16 subnets in the
192.168.x.x number space, one can use variable-width subnet masks
so unless you have a lot of hosts or, for some reason, are
sharing space with another subnet, one can spread out to a Class
B-style network which would be the whole space and have a subnet
mask of 255.255.0.0 or you can make lots of little subnets of
various mask sizes with blocks of 16 addresses being about the
smallest subnet that is practical. Remember you always lose the
all-zeros and all-ones broadcast addresses because they are
special plus there is likely a router address taken by the router
which leaves 13 addresses for hosts in each subnet.
I remember early in the nineties our campus went from a
single Class C to a Class B network and the whole campus used the
Class B subnet mask with bridges holding the whole thing
together. You should have seen some of the arp storms that would
blow up like wild fire when somebody had a misconfigured host
trying to be helpful or maybe deliberately misconfigured because
somebody got their socks in a wad over something and started the
fire on purpose.
It wasn't long before we began more efficiently using the
number space with big departments getting let's say 1024 or 512
possible addresses and others getting 16 or 32 addresses.
By the time I left, we were using the huge private
network space of 10.0.0.0 with aNAT or Network Address
Translation to parts of the old Class B network and it generally
worked well.
I wrote a C then a perl program which would assign IP
addresses for hosts on our networks that knew the sizes of all
the subnet masks so assigning IP addresses was something anybody
in our group could do without much more information other than
what host name the customer wanted and what building it was in.
My job was basically to encode all that in to rules for
automation to keep us safe from making mistakes and it worked.
Martin
