Removing netmasks in web ui from individual IP addresses

[artiomello]

Hi,

As suggested by @jeffgdotorg, initiating a discussion regarding a FR #14654.

As mentioned in the original FR, my suggestion is to remove netmasks from individual IPs in the WEB UI, perhaps using a toggle in the settings.

The reasoning for that is, (I'm assuming) unless you're working with network equipment specifically, you're not going to use a netmask when designating an IP address. Now, I'm not a network engineer, so that world is pretty much obscure to me, but coming from a system/infrastructure administration point of view - the only time I would use a netmask next to an IP address is to define a subnet/prefix, not an individual address. And every single time I do see a IP/netmask pair out of the context - I immediately see it as a such and have to use an IP calculator to double check if it's a network or an actual IP address that I'm looking at.

From that perspective, having every single IP address with a mask, especially when looking at the IP Address section for a specific prefix - I already have the prefix/subnet information at the top of the page. To me it's completely redundant. And for less IT savvy people (e.g. service desk using it as a plain IPAM tool) - even less so, as it might add an unnecessary confusion.

Here are my answers to your questions from the comments in FR:

• Which tools do you use that omit masks when listing individual IP addresses?
  As far as I can remember, not a single one I've used during the past 6 years have required me to define an individual IP using a CIDR notation, perhaps with the exception of configuring IPs in Ubuntu Linux. But even there, I believe, it depends on how you do it. Also, we're deploying VMs using Ansible and even there a mask is a separate property.

• What kinds of tasks occupy you during your workday?
  Administration of VMware clusters, Windows Servers, Azure, O365, automated deployment of VMs, some Linux and a few other systems here and there.

Hope that helps.