Thanks to:
Arthur Hyun
David M. Davisson
Mike Salehi
Richard Schulting
Satish
I got my answer. The most complete was from Arthur Hyun:
the broadcast address is derived from the network and the subnet value,
so if the subnet values are different the broadcast addresses will often
be different (but not always!). if the broadcasts are different, then
hosts will not recognize each other's IP broadcasts. this will break
things like rwho, rwall, bootp/dhcp when not configured to use a
specific
server, and stuff like that.
other than that, the subnet is used for IP routing. the machine checks
to see if a destination IP address is on your network. if they are the
same, the machine will send directly. if not, it will try to send to
a router. this can cause extra traffic on your LAN and it will show
up in a traceroute. your router may also send an ICMP redirect to the
sending machine, and that will show up in the host's routing table.
note that different netmasks does not necessarily mean disjoint
networks.
one netmask may be bigger than the other, so one host may think it has
a local route whereas the other may not.
-arthur
Other answers:
============================================================
On 16 May 97 at 10:55, Farzad Mansour wrote:
Properly setup differnet subnets on the same physical LAN will not hose
anything. If you can describe your problem in more detail I can give
you some
guidance.
Other answers:
============================================================
Farzad,
The result is not as bad as in theory can be. Some programs
(nfsd) will
do the right thing. On the otherhand some others will not arp properly
and
you
need a route or arp proxy between the two.
Other answers:
=============================================================
first, one shouldn't do this. Many problems arise with conflicting
netmasks.
some examples:
Default gateway isn't reagable probably
RIP routing doesn't work properly
peer to peer normaly doesn't as well
If you would like to find out exactly what addresses are able to
communicate,
check the amount of zero-bits in de mask (write them down binary) and
put your
host adresses beside them (binary as well)
again, I wouldn't do this...
Regards,
RIchard
Other answers:
=============================================================
Don't think you can different subnet masks on machines that reside on
the
same segment! ...assuming your are running Ethernet (IEEE) tcp/ip.
Satish
--
Captain Zod... zod@home.net