Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:05:37 +0100 (CET)
From: Erik Nordmark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| It isn't obvious to me from reading RFC 2460 whether a host can drop packets
| with routing headers instead of resubmitting them for transmissing to the
| next hop.
You don't have to read 2460 to know the answer to that particular question.
Of course it can (drop them) - hosts, routers, anything else, are permitted
to drop any packets that they want to, for any purposes that they want to,
nothing can force someone else to process any packets they don't want to
process.
That can mean disrupted communications if applied to extremes of course,
to which the solution is simply not to rely upon any system which drops
packets that you need forwarded ... in the above example, you really wouldn't
sanely attempt to source route through a host which you didn't know was
prepared to forward your packets.
There is though a different, related, question - one where what 2460 says
is applicable ... that is whether a host implementation should simply drop
packets containing source routes, rather than forwarding them.
Here we get the questions of the conformance of the implementation to the
spec.
And there I think the answer is a clear no - implementations are required
to be at least capable of processing routing headers (even in hosts).
kre
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