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Re: TCP Checksum Interoperability

2002-04-05 15:40:27

  *> From listadm(_at_)loki(_dot_)ietf(_dot_)org  Fri Apr  5 11:50:30 2002
  *> X-Authentication-Warning: ietf.org: majordom set sender to 
owner-ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org using -f
  *> Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 14:29:44 -0500
  *> From: Rob Austein <sra+ietf(_at_)hactrn(_dot_)net>
  *> To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
  *> Subject: Re: TCP Checksum Interoperability
  *> User-Agent: Wanderlust/2.4.1 (Stand By Me) SEMI/1.13.7 (Awazu) FLIM/1.13.2 
(Kasanui) Emacs/20.7 (i386--freebsd) MULE/4.0 (HANANOEN)
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  *> The last time this came up for a TCP implementation I used to
  *> maintain, our interpretation of Robustness Principle applied to this
  *> problem dictated that we shouldn't send segments with checksum fields
  *> set to all ones (that is, we shouldn't send ~(+0)), but that we had to
  *> accept either ~(+0) or ~(-0) in received segments.
  *> 
  *> Strictly speaking, either zero state is completely legal, but one is
  *> (apparently) more surprising to most implementors than the other, due
  *> to the implementation techniques that suggest themselves on most
  *> modern processors.
  *> 

We thought we had laid these issues to rest in 1988, in RFC 1071.

Bob Braden