Nortel Networks NN47250-500 Text entry conventions and allowed characters

46 Using the command-line interface

NN47250-500 (Version 03.01)

Text entry conventions and allowed characters

Unless otherwise indicated, the WSS Software CLI accepts standard ASCII alphanumeric characters, except for tabs and

spaces, and is case-insensitive.

The CLI has specific notation requirements for MAC addresses, IP addresses, and masks, and allows you to group user-

names, MAC addresses, virtual LAN (VLAN) names, and ports in a single command.

Nortel recommends that you do not use the same name with different capitalizations for VLANs or access control lists

(ACLs). For example, do not configure two separate VLANs with the names red and RED.

The CLI does not support the use of special characters including the following in any named elements such as SSIDs and

VLANs: ampersand (&), angle brackets (< >), number sign (#), question mark (?), or quotation marks (“”).

In addition, the CLI does not support the use of international characters such as the accented É in DÉCOR.

WSS Software displays MAC addresses in hexadecimal numbers with a colon (:) delimiter between bytes—for example,

00:01:02:1a:00:01. You can enter MAC addresses with either hyphen (-) or colon (:) delimiters, but colons are preferred.

For shortcuts:

• You can exclude leading zeros when typing a MAC address. WSS Software displays of MAC addresses include all

leading zeros.

• In some specified commands, you can use the single-asterisk (*) wildcard character to represent an entire MAC

address or from 1 byte to 5 bytes of the address. (For more information, see “MAC address wildcards” on page 47.)

WSS Software displays IP addresses in dotted decimal notation—for example, 192.168.1.111. WSS Software makes use

of both subnet masks and wildcard masks.

Unless otherwise noted, use classless interdomain routing (CIDR) format to express subnet masks—for example,

192.168.1.112/24. You indicate the subnet mask with a forward slash (/) and specify the number of bits in the mask.

Security access control lists (ACLs) use source and destination IP addresses and wildcard masks to determine whether

the WSS filters or forwards IP packets. Matching packets are either permitted or denied network access. The ACL

checks the bits in IP addresses that correspond to any 0s (zeros) in the mask, but does not check the bits that correspond

to 1s (ones) in the mask. You specify the wildcard mask in dotted decimal notation.

For example, the address 10.0.0.0 and mask 0.255.255.255 match all IP addresses that begin with 10 in the first octet.

The ACL mask must be a contiguous set of zeroes starting from the first bit. For example, 0.255.255.255, 0.0.255.255,

and 0.0.0.255 are valid ACL masks. However, 0.255.0.255 is not a valid ACL mask.