Re: TCP Checksum Interoperability

Matt Crawford <crawdad@fnal.gov> Fri, 05 April 2002 23:13 UTC

Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 17:13:57 -0600
From: Matt Crawford <crawdad@fnal.gov>
Subject: Re: TCP Checksum Interoperability
In-reply-to: "05 Apr 2002 23:13:47 +0100." <Pine.SOL.4.43.0204052248210.5049-100000@phaestos.ee.surrey.ac.uk>
To: Lloyd Wood <L.Wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
Cc: ietf@ietf.org, tcp-impl@grc.nasa.gov
Message-id: <200204052313.g35NDvZ10445@gungnir.fnal.gov>
Sender: owner-tcp-impl@grc.nasa.gov
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO
Content-Length: 701
Lines: 16

> and RFC791 claims ttl is in seconds, ergo I don't have to decrement
> ttl because I know my traffic is on paths less than a second
> long.
> 
> Cool reasoning.

You lose -- 791 says you have to subtract at least 1 from TTL even if.

However, I think that (A) most or all extant IPv4 routers violate 791
if they happen hold a packet more than a second, and (B) IPv6
invalidated TCP's correctness by defining the Hop Limit field to be a
hop limit and have no connection to time.  A TCP riding on IPv6 may
receive old segments an unbounded time later without any other
network element breaking a spec.

I said so at the time, but nobody cared.  No doubt Vint will take
care of multi-second hops for us.