Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!NNSC.NSF.NET!craig
From: craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: re: fletcher
Message-ID: <8912071550.AA28075@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 7 Dec 89 13:08:11 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 15


It seemed to me that the key point of Johnny's original note was that
gee, there exist these checksums with different error detection properties
that *might* be interesting for certain applications using TCP.  Could
there be a way to use a different checksum?

It seems to me that's a perfectly fair question to ask -- and the answer
appears to be yes, there's a straightforward way to negotiate a new checksum.

Whether that's a good thing or not, is entirely separate.  As some folks
have pointed out, there's always this problem with new features -- some
idiot decides the way out of a problem (e.g. broken hardware) is to use
the new feature instead of fixing the proper problem.

Craig