The justification offered for this is that the routing sotware for Novell servers and/or Novell Lan Workplace (their PC TCP/IP software) does not support subnetting of Class Cs. My initial reaction was disbelief that this sort of Dinosaur DNA is still so prevalent, but more than one offer of this sort of justification seems to suggest it is.

If this is indeed true (and my reaction is a bit like Keith's) we certainly should put strong pressure on Novell to get this right. My view would be to give these applicants a "reasonable" number of Class C numbers so that they can get on today, but warn them that the same justification won't be accepted next time and that they must complain to Novell. In practice, though, I guess they'd "only" cut usage by a factor of 2 by using 4-bit subnets in this case. What I find more of a pain is that it may be difficult to connect a site to an external network via a Novell server and using a 2-bit subnet. (We do this with IP connections to JANET and I guess others do.) If the server couldn't support this we'd have to end up using a whole Class C for a point-to-point link. Bob Day