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From: HEDRICK@RED.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: more oddities from the swamp
Message-ID: <12208515943.62.HEDRICK@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 21-May-86 15:01:02 EDT
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Posted: Wed May 21 15:01:02 1986
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I have been through this with Mills also.  Everything that you say
is right.  But it is also nearly irrelevant for those of us out
in the swamp surrounded by binary-only alligators.  I would be
quite happy with an ICMP who is my gateway or ICMP I am the default
gateway.  But until such a thing shows up, I use what I have, and
that is routed.  I think this list needs to discuss both what the
standards should be and what we should do until it becomes practical
to use the standards.  My best estimate is that it will take about
3 years between the time you define something and when we can
depend upon using it.  At the moment it is likely to take longer
than 3 years, since anything that is done now will have just missed
a new release of Berkeley Unix.  A number of vendors don't do anything
until a features shows up in BSD.  So any new ICMP things are likely
to have to wait for 4.4, then another year or so until all the vendors
incorporate the 4.4 features.  Lest you think I am being overly
pessimistic, look at the slow spead of subnets.  A change in broadcast
address is going to be particularly messy, since unless everybody does
it at the same time (a manifest impossibility), we could be in for
some incompatibility.  I would recommend that implementations should be
prepared to accept any of 
  net.0
  net.subnet.0
  -1
for the moment.  Once everyone recognizes -1, all senders would start
using it, and the 0's could be phased out.  Alternatively, your
subnet RFC could have specified that the correct broadcast address
for implementations that use 0's is net.0, not net.subnet.0.  then
we would have one less incompatibility to deal with.

By the way, a month or so ago we got this shiny new collection of
Internet protocol documents.  I assume this is what most vendors
use to do their implementations.  I didn't see subnetting it in.
I didn't see any signs of -1 being specified as the broadcast address.
How many vendors do you think know that they are supposed to be
changing the broadcast address?
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