Hello,

We publish journal on-line that are mainly accessed from institutions. We get the IP address of institutions that should have access to these journals from publishers but there doesn't seam to be any consistency among them. Is there a standard for declaring an IP address ranges?

I looked a little for a standard but can't seam to find one. Should the range be expressed within the octet? ( 192.168.1-10.* ), as two full IPs (192.168.1.* - 192.168.10.*) or either. Do the ranges need to include subnetting information (192.168.1.* - 192.168.10.*/255.255.255.0 or 192.168.1.* - 192.168.10.*/24)? Or, can this be figured out by the IPs that are given?

Also, are there any PERL modules that follow and parse a spec?

TIA,

In theory, there's a rule. But in real word - no rules. It depends on the institution or their ISP (how many IPs they get). In most situations you can just get a list. It happens quite often that the IPs are not in order (for example: 192.168.1.4, 192.168.4.125). Of course, all the IPs we use in the posts here are not real (they're local).

There is no standard as such, but the information you have been supplied with is in a fairly conventional format, and seems quite clear.

You don't need subnet mask information to setup filters for these ranges. Subnet masks only have relevance to hosts on the source subnet and routing protocols within the internet.