Our campus IP will soon change, and I am preparing to update our many
eresource providers. While we can update a fair number by logging into the
providers' admin portals and manually changing our settings, quite a few
will need to be handled by direct contacts to the providers.

I am not especially technical and would welcome some basic insights on the
question below so we can minimize confusion when we contact providers.

The format of the old IP is 1111.11.1.1 and the format of the new IP is
222.222.2.222/27
The first eresource we tested (via updating the admin portal) would not
accept the /27 portion of the new IP. My colleague's explanation was that
the /27 suffix denotes how many bytes are available, which is extraneous
technical info that some systems may need, but is not required. Since our
old IP does not have such a suffix, and it was rejected in our testing, I
am inclined to omit the /27 when we contact providers. In nontechnical
terms please, do you advise including or excluding the /27 suffix?

Thank you!
Kristin
Franklin & Marshall College Library