Re: [v6ops] new draft: draft-generic-v6ops-tunmtu

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:18 AM, Templin, Fred L wrote:

> An historical anecdote - Fred B. may know more about this.
> In the mid-1980's companies such as Digital Equipment
> Corporation produced 1st generation Ethernet gear that
> could not always keep up with wire-speed. I know of at
> least one of these 1st generation NICs that would reset
> itself if it dropped a packet, which happened quite
> frequently if the card received a burst of fragments
> from a large fragmented datagram. Was this the genesis
> of the RFC1918 text that says:
> 
>  "Work with slow machines leads us to believe that if it is
>   necessary to fragment messages, sending the small IP fragment
>   first maximizes the chance of a host with a slow interface of
>   receiving all the fragments."
> 
> ??

It may have been. I was the editor, a long time after the fact of that text being written. I can tell you that there were a list of NIC issues in the 1980's; Novell could only receive packets if there was a certain gap between them, Cisco AGS with a SEEQ chip had a gap requirement, and so on. In 2012, I wouldn't read a lot into those comments.