He’s quite correct though – you need to understand the different pieces that you’re dealing with in this case.

Simplest answer I can give you is that the purpose of the subnet mask is to tell the given system where the dividing line between the network portion and the local host portion of a given IP address is. If you don’t understand the fundamentals of IP addressing, you should not be making changes to your system configurations.

If nothing else, those types of changes will lead you to call in someone professional who will charge you a lot more money because “you worked on it first” – and that person has to figure what changes were made, where they were made – and then wonder if he/she actually found and fixed them all. Been there, done that more times than I care to count.

Bob