translating fragments

[Robert L Ullmann <[e-mail]>]

Greg,

It is very good to get detailed comments; thank you.

I have a number of related comments, but carrying on an exchange
re multiple points is difficult, so I'll pick one to start with,
and bring the others back up as I do the close review of the doc with your
comments.

----

Translating fragments/segments without reassembling them would be
really nice; IPv7 suggested that at one point, butin the process of
doing trial implementation, I found a "little" problem: just how do
you figure out the offset in the resulting datagram?

Note that IPv4 and CLNP have this not-quite-stated assumption that the
recving host doing reassembly gets the "offset 0" fragment/segment
with a N-layer header that is THE SAME SIZE as the header was when
the datagram was fragmented by some router (or router*S*!) 

THis assumed axiom doesn't hold in the presence of different network
headers. I don't know how to solve this so as to allow translating
fragments; I'd love to have someone find something I've missed.

Note that it doesn't even hold for all-native-CATNIP, since the IPv4/CLNP
axiom doesn't apply; CATNIP forwarders can and will change the
header size when it pays to do so. 

The offset (IMHO) should have been defined as offset from the TPDU
start; an open issue is whether CATNIP-native should do this (I think it
should) but since IPv4/CLNP define it as NDPU-start relative, the 
translation problem still exists.

Ideas anyone?

Rob