Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!jade!ucbvax!AI.AI.MIT.EDU!JBVB
From: JBVB@AI.AI.MIT.EDU ("James B. VanBokkelen")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Response to Long Distance NFS Query
Message-ID: <304205.871227.JBVB@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>
Date: 27 Dec 87 23:49:32 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 13

In the Chaosnet example mentioned, the router was running just fine,
and the memory problem was corrupting one in N packets forwarded.
Yeah, a diagnostic would have found it, but networks are big and
fuzzy, and the failure was intermittent, and I think the people
who first realized there was a problem spent some time just locating
it, and some more time thinking it was a software bug.

It would be nice if everything ran memory diagnostics as the idle
task, and it would be nice if there weren't interfaces which corrupt
packets silently under some conditions.  Maybe someday.  For the
moment, I think end-to-end error detection is a good thing.

jbvb