Description of problem: This is really pretty simple. The installer will not take dotted quadformated net masks, ie: 255.255.255.224. Instead you have to enter the address as a cidr slash style address. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. start an install 2. say you have a static ip4 address 3. enter the ip address of the station 4. Try the enter the net mask as a net mask like the on screen domentation says you can No dice. Additional info: As much as anything this may be a documentation error. In this day and age I don't see any reason not to just use the slash notation. But the documentation, but the readmes and the on screen documentation says that you can enter this in the dotted quad format. You can't. Frankly I say fix the documentation not the program. It is time everyone was using the slash notation anyway.
At what point during installation? Is it before or after you see "Starting anaconda, the Fedora installation program..." printed on the console?
Before starting anaconda. Boot from a rescue cd there are now several options on the screen select install upgrade ... ie the first option. Then you are asked the language and the keyboard to be used. (English US) Select install method of http on the next screen If you have more than one ethernet card you will be asked to choose which one. then you will see a screen that asks how to configure the ethernet card to be used. It will have options for enabling or disabling ip4 and ip6. The ip4 can then either be dhcp or manual. In my case manual is needed as we use static ips. Now we are to the problem screen. It is labeled Manual TCP/IP Configuration. There are basically four blanks on three lines. The first line is for the ip address and the network size indicator. The second is for the router the third for the name server. The problem is with the network size indicator. According to the on screen and also the on-line documentation this needs to be entered as a dotted quad. IE a /27 network entered as a 255.255.255.224. But it will not take the entry as documented. Instead you must enter the network size as a /27 in this example. Now as I mentioned above the entire system works great with the entry of a slash notation network size indicator. This is the way that the world is going, and so I see no problem with requiring it be entered this way. But it should be consistent. That is if you are going to require a slash notation network size indicator, then the documentation should not be telling you to enter this as a dotted quad. So as I said above I would fix the on screen documentation and tell people who do the on-line documentation, and not try and do a programming fix to match the documentation. This is a change from fc4 where you were required to enter this as a dotted quad and a slash notation would not work. I could send a screen picture if needed, but I hope this gets you to the point you need.
Is this something that should be fixed in fc9. If so once I figure out how to play with the alpha I will give it a try.
OK found how to play with fc9. This is now working properly in fc9 alpha, as of this date. Interestingly the fix seems to be to make the net mask format work again. Oh well that works too.