[ih] IPv4 address size debate

Jack Haverty jack at 3kitty.org
Sun Nov 8 19:46:43 PST 2009


On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 21:30 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Was this possibility discussed at the time

I remember lots of discussion about the appropriate length of various
fields in the headers (TCP and IP) - not just the address.  In the end,
I think the "options" functionality was viewed as a way to fix things
later if it turned out that some field wasn't big enough.  You could
always define a new option to hold a bunch of extra bytes for whatever
field needed them.  Not elegant, but it was a way to stop the debate.

/Jack





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