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From: drw@pascal.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Unknown TCP/IP options
Message-ID: <DRW.90Aug30222328@pascal.mit.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 90 05:23:28 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: MIT Dept. of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA, USA
Lines: 21

Is there any standard for how a TCP/IP implementation ignores options
that it does not understand and/or implement?

Of course, that doesn't happen now, because there are only three
options, and all implementations are required to implement them, but
this might not always be true.  What I'm proposing is that an
implementation can ignore an unimplemnted option, which requires that
there be a convention to tell whether an option has an argument or
not.  If I remember correctly, among the current options, 0 and 1
don't have arguments, and 2 does, so we should establish the
convention that the '2' bit (second-lowest) is 0 if the option has no
argument and 1 if it does.

Is this a good idea?

Is it worth worrying about?

(Please reply by e-mail, as I don't read this newsgroup regularly.)

Dale Worley
drw@math.mit.edu