The 'tude [Was MTU of the Internet?]

Fri Feb 6 02:12:17 UTC 1998

Steve Carter writes:
> Without discussion and questioning where would we all be?

They laughed at Fulton. They also laughed, however, at Bozo the Clown.

I find it embarassing that people who should know this stuff cold are,
putting it VERY charitably, speculating (very badly) about stuff that
is already well understood. If you just spent a little time reading,
you guys wouldn't have to blather about "why did they do things this
way?  does the don't fragment bit cause your router to explode? what
is this ICMP thing anyway? And I think we need MTUs to modulate
according to the sequence of digits of PI".

> Would we all be running ARPA nets, or even still hunting animals
> with clubs?  Do you consider the standards to be the last word and
> that there is no room for discussion?

It would be neat if people actually had some familiarity with the
contents of the RFCs before discussing them. I realize that actually
reading is difficult for many in this mailing list, but I suspect that
audio or pictographic versions of the documents might be made
available for many of you.

I suppose that's cruel, but to someone who actually understands how
this stuff works, it sounds like, hmmm.... it sounds more or less like
a couple of people saying back and forth "I bet you could make Oxygen
atoms with more protons! That would make them taste better!"

Sure, no one gets anywhere without discussion and inquiry, but there
is informed discussion and there is drivel.

The far, far sadder thing, by the way, is that many of you aren't
nearly as ignorant and stupid as the guys at the vendors. "Oh, we
disabled slow start because we benchmarked much higher performance
that way! We don't handle fragmented packets because we were too busy!
Oh, and we've got this neat new proprietary IP Option..."

Perry