On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:11:39 +0100, Thomas Bellman said: > On 2018-12-19 20:47 MET, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: > > There was indeed a fairly long stretch of time (until the CIDR RFC came out > > and > > specifically said it wasn't at all canon) where we didn't have an RFC that > > specifically said that netmask bits had to be contiguous. > > How did routers select the best (most specific) route for an address? > If the routing table held both (e.g.) 10.20.30.0/255.255.255.64 and > 10.20.30.0/255.255.255.32, then 10.20.30.97 would match both, and have > the same number of matching bits.
That didn't stop sites getting creative with it on their internal networks, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one router (Bay, Proteon, whatever) happened to have an implementation that Just Worked. Remember - there were enough ambiguities and odd implementations that RFC 1122/1123 had to be issued. *Lots* of "How the <expletive> did that ever work?" back in those days - and often the answer was "By accident".
