Linux – I am on Rackspace Cloud. What is Bandwidth Out and Bandwidth In

CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing, pronounced "kidder" or "cider" - add your own local variant to the comments!) is a system of defining the network part of an IP address (usually people think of this as a subnet mask). The reason it's "classless" is that it allows a way to break IP networks down more flexibly than their base class.

When IP networks were first defined, IPs had classes based on their binary prefix:

Class    Binary Prefix    Range                       Network Bits
A        0*               0.0.0.0-127.255.255.255     8
B        10*              128.0.0.0-191.255.255.255   16
C        110*             192.0.0.0-223.255.255.255   24
D        1110*            224.0.0.0-239.255.255.255
E        1111*            240.0.0.0-255.255.255.255

(Note that this is the source of people referring to a /24 as a "class C", although that's not a strictly true comparison because a class C needed to have a specific prefix)

These binary prefixes were used for routing large chunks of IP space around. This was inefficient because it resulted in large blocks being assigned to organizations who didn't necessarily need them, and also because Class Cs could only be assigned in 24 bit increments, meaning that routing tables could get unnecessarily large as multiple Class Cs were routed to the same location.

CIDR was defined to allow variable length subnet masks (VLSM) to be applied to networks. As the name applies, address groups, or networks, can be broken down into groups that have no direct relationship to the natural "class" they belong to.

The basic premise of VLSM is to provide the count of the number of network bits in a network. Since an IPv4 address is a 32-bit integer, the VLSM will always be between 0 and 32 (although I'm not sure in what instance you might have a 0-length mask).

The easiest way to start calculating VLSM/CIDR in your head is to understand the "natural" 8-bit boundaries:

CIDR    Dotted Quad
/8      255.0.0.0
/16     255.255.0.0
/24     255.255.255.0
/32     255.255.255.255

(By the way, it's perfectly legal, and fairly common in ACLs, to use a /32 mask. It simply means that you are referring to a single IP)

Once you grasp those, it's simple binary arithmetic to move up or down to get number of hosts. For instance, if a /24 has 256 IPs (let's leave off network and broadcast addresses for now, that's a different networking theory question), increasing the subnet by one bit (to /25) will reduce the host space by one bit (to 7), meaning there will be 128 IPs.

Here's a table of the last octet. This table can be shifted to any octet to get the dotted quad equivalent.

CIDR    Dotted Quad
/24     255.255.255.0
/25     255.255.255.128
/26     255.255.255.192
/27     255.255.255.224
/28     255.255.255.240
/29     255.255.255.248
/30     255.255.255.252
/31     255.255.255.254
/32     255.255.255.255

As an example of shifting these to another octet, /18 (which is /26 minus 8 bits, so shifted an octet) would be 255.255.192.0.

For more data on the layout of Linux file-systems, look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (now at version 2.3, with the beta 3.0 version deployed on most recent distros). It does explain some of where the names came from:

• /bin - Binaries.
• /boot - Files required for booting.
• /dev - Device files.
• /etc - Et cetera. The name is inherited from the earliest Unixes, which is when it became the spot to put config-files.
• /home - Where home directories are kept.
• /lib - Where code libraries are kept.
• /media - A more modern directory, but where removable media gets mounted.
• /mnt - Where temporary file-systems are mounted.
• /opt - Where optional add-on software is installed. This is discrete from /usr/local/ for reasons I'll get to later.
• /run - Where runtime variable data is kept.
• /sbin - Where super-binaries are stored. These usually only work with root.
• /srv - Stands for "serve". This directory is intended for static files that are served out. /srv/http would be for static websites, /srv/ftp for an FTP server.
• /tmp - Where temporary files may be stored.
• /usr - Another directory inherited from the Unixes of old, it stands for "UNIX System Resources". It does not stand for "user" (see the Debian Wiki). This directory should be sharable between hosts, and can be NFS mounted to multiple hosts safely. It can be mounted read-only safely.
• /var - Another directory inherited from the Unixes of old, it stands for "variable". This is where system data that varies may be stored. Such things as spool and cache directories may be located here. If a program needs to write to the local file-system and isn't serving that data to someone directly, it'll go here.

/opt vs /usr/local

The rule of thumb I've seen is best described as:

Use /usr/local for things that would normally go into /usr, or are overriding things that are already in /usr. Use /opt for things that install all in one directory, or are otherwise special.