Sounds as if you are using some crap O/S then - maybe if you threaten it it may pay attention.
They're all legal - but are they used? /31 can only be used in a non-broadcast mode.
Have you got all of the other stuff memorized? I'm not a hardware guy (other than working on my home systems), but our procedure at work is a hard copy with the blanks filled in, and spaces where the tech puts serial and property tag numbers, and of course, a signature for audit.
I've got both the Unix and Linux 'in a nutshell' books, and use them regularly. I also have a couple of 'script reference' files, with examples of some of my more interesting efforts.
Declaring a single mask where it can't otherwise be confused is one thing, working in a multi-subnet situation is quite another. We declare a local net (the net that the host is actually attached to), then a facility net (actually nets, because some are not contiguous), and the company wide mask - and guess what - they're all overlapping. Networking code is set to utilize the narrowest mask that describes the destination. We also have non-public nets, but they tend to be much more restrictive in scope and mostly use single 'network' wide masks for routing. (I'm ignoring the dynamic routing announcement protocols like RIP, OSPF, and so on - _that_ ought to be "interesting".)
Me thinks you want to temper that a bit - see RFC0917 and RFC0932 if you can find a copy of them. Our systems use one or two octets as a network definition, and this is going to eliminate quite a large number of your 4e9 values. IANA currently has no assignments wider than a /8 (and only 1 from APNIC and 43 from ARIN that wide), and only
14 more that are wider than or equal to a /10. You may also want to look at the other subnet RFCs of the era - look for RFCs 0925, 0932, 0936 and 1040 for some interesting reading. Given 172.16.0.0/12 as a network assignment by the {LNR}IR to your entity, and 250 hosts (plus four routers, broadcast, and the only occasional usable 'network' address for hosts) per subnet, how many subnets can you have? Want some more fun? Knock that back to 100 addresses per subnet (net, broadcast, say 3 or 4 routers, and
94 or 95 workstations/servers). Let us know what your network masks look on each subnet given an assignment from RIPE of a /16.
and only 31 usable in "functional" terms, and because IANA didn't assign us 0.0.0.0/0 as a netblock, a lot less in "practical" terms.
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