craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge) (12/07/89)
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