1

I received this one today, the available answers look a bit woolly to me.
I know which answer I am leaning towards but I am not happy with it as yet so not hit the button.
thoughts?
Personally I am not happy with the term “significance” and “number” in an answer. The hint is not really a hint.
8f7ab6ab-43e1-437c-962e-0fe47e9847b8-Daily.png

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2

Not sure what you’re seeing as wooly, there’s only one appropriate answer there

One answer = subnet

One answer = dns

One answer = default gateway

One answer = dhcp

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3

Yes I know I am probably overthinking it

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4

I got it right but I didn’t like the use of those 2 words in the question and answer for some reason.

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5

Dunno, @briser ​ - it seemed like a decent question to me. Maybe it’s just you (just this once)? :grin:

Link: https://community.spiceworks.com/questions/4872/explanation

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6

Aye it’s just me. I’m getting paranoid with misreading ambiguous answers this year after some poor ones so I read them many times over looking for a hidden gotcha.

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7

I stopped doing these a few years ago but this particular question and answer is about as unambiguous as you can get.

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8

I understand your hesitation.

If you understand how the subnet MASK gets used and what its purpose is, the “significance” of the subnet mask is not one of the answers offered.

Put another way, the device doesn’t care about what the OP says the subnet mask determines and the device certainly doesn’t use it for that purpose. Humans use it for that, sometimes.

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9

The “closest to being correct” answer is the one about the number of usable IP addresses. However, that’s certainly not the “significance” of the subnet mask but rather something that happens to be true as the result of it. It just flags which left-most continuous bits designate the network ID with the remainder designating the host ID and that’s it.

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10

It’s called a subnet mask, not a subnet identifier. The value is used for testing under masking to determine whether the destination address for data is inside or outside the network and therefore whether to send the packet to the destination directly or via the gateway.

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11

That I can understand, and is one of the reasons I stopped doing the Daily Challenges.

12

This doesn’t detract from anything I said. Yes, the mask gets applied to the IP address in order to determine what subnet a given IP address belongs to. Like I said, it flags which bits (as in, the literal binary digits that make up an IP address) will compose the network ID segment with the remainder of the bits that are not flagged forming the host ID. The term “flagging” refers to marking a given bit with a value of 1. Also, to be a valid subnet mask, the bits flagged must be contiguous and include the most significant bit. As such, an IPv4 subnet mask of 0.0.0.0 would be invalid and so would 255.255.255.64.

Additionally, the subnet mask is not just used in routing out packets. If a non-gateway host receives an IP packet, it will use the subnet mask to determine if the destination address on that packet shares the same network ID as it does. If it does, then it can proceed to check whether the remainder is either addressed to it’s host ID or is a broadcast packet (i.e. all the host ID bits are set to 1) and proceed to accept it if it matches one of those two conditions.

See here for reference on the terms “network ID” and “host ID”: https://www.howtogeek.com/341307/how-do-ip-addresses-work/#the-two-parts-of-an-ip-address

13

One of the problems with having Daily Challenge at all is that our brilliant community can poke holes in seemingly every single entry, so it is very difficult to maintain a database of them.

Can you (the people who agree that the question needs to be improved) help us out by please offering some suggestions as to what exactly should change in the wording of the question and/or answer?

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14

I don’t think it was a hard question provided you know the subject matter, but personally I would change “Significance of a Subnet Mask” to something like “The Primary Function of a Subnet Mask”

I would also change “It determines the number of usable IP addresses in a network” to “It determines the range of usable IP addresses in a network”

@suzanne-spiceworks ​

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15

Thanks for the suggestions. :slight_smile: I’ll put this one on the list for alteration.

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