In the author scenario, for example, the employees in Philadelphia (location PHILADELPH) store their documents on the content servers in Philadelphia, while their colleagues in Tokyo (location TOKYO) store theirs on the content servers in Tokyo.

The locations can be determined from their IP address; that is, they are defined on the basis of subnet masks.

A subnet mask has the following format: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/YY

• XXX defines one byte of the IP address in each case (permissible values: 0 to 255).
• YY defines the number of valid bits (permissible values: 0 to 32)

The subnets can be entered in simple notation, for example, the input 155.5 is mapped to 155.5.0.0/16, which contains the IP addresses 155.5.0.0 to 155.5.255.255.

Different locations, therefore, can be defined for different submasks.

In the case of ambiguous definitions (for example, 155.5/16 and 155.5.17/8), the most restrictive definition (here 155.5.17/8) applies to a given IP address (for example, 155.5.17.3).