IP Routing Question

[Brian Kelsay]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Monty J. Harder [mailto:dmonster at juno.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 10:03 PM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: IP Routing Question
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2 Jan 2001 20:04:52 -0600 (CST) Tony Zafiropoulos
> <tonyz at ctitek.com> writes:
> 
> 
> > I am no expert...
> > 
> > You want to have traffic from the net get to the Target system?
> > 
> > What is it that you want to get to the target system?  tcp or udp
> > applications?
> 
> 
>   Both.  As well as anything else IP can carry.  I want to 
> know if I can
> use a private IP address hop between two public IP hops and not break
> anything.  I'm getting answers that range from "you can('t) 
> do that" to
> "it should work, but it's not According to Hoyle".  But I 
> don't yet have
> a definitive answer as to =why= it doesn't work, if indeed it 
> doesn't. 
> Because if nobody can tell me why it won't work, then it 
> should work, and
> all those people using /30 subnets to connect two routers can release
> those public IP addresses back to extend the life of IPv4 a few more
> years without requiring a total rebuild of the infrastructure.

If those addresses were redistributed to, say another company, then isn't it
possible that when using an incorrect subnet mask that traffic could be
misrouted and packets possibly lost or intercepted.  e.g. I use 255.255.0.0
for the mask and I should be using 255.255.x.0.  That's just one reason I
can think of besides the RFC saying not to do it.