When using the Location by Subnet wizard, can CIDR notation be used for defining a subnet, or do you have to use the “subnet by range” option and enter the first and last IP Addresses?
The reason that I ask is that it appears the property is not returning values, and looking at the properties of our existing action, the ranges are indicated by CIDR. I don’t know if this is something the wizard generates, or if the operator that initially deployed the action did so incorrectly.
The CIDR notation is not used by the wizard, but since many customers keep the CIDR info with the subnet info, we have an option on the last page of the wizard to “Remove CIDR information from Subnets”. If you paste subnets with the CIDR notation and you don’t check this option, then it will not return any results.
To explain this a little more:
The agent reports its subnet as IP Address masked by subnet mask.
The agent doesn’t need the CIDR info because it doesn’t provide extra data (I believe the CIDR info just counts the bits in the subnet mask, which the agent already knows).
Here are some examples:
q: (address of it, subnet mask of it, subnet address of it, cidr string of it) of adapters of network
A: 192.168.104.223, 255.255.252.0, 192.168.104.0, 192.168.104.0/22
A: 192.168.100.104, 255.255.255.0, 192.168.100.0, 192.168.100.0/24
And so if you list the subnets in the format of the subnet address the agent returns (the third element in the list above), then the agent will know what you are talking about…
It looks like the last operator entered CIDR notation and failed to check the checkbox. I re-deployed the wizard using IP ranges, and everything is working fine.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but being able to enter network ranges with CIDR would be a useful shortcut for the wizard. It makes sense that the agent itself doesn’t need CIDR, it just takes longer to define network ranges during deployment.