The question is, can data be corrupted without detection or correction, over TCP/IP? It seems like the checksumming used by TCP/IP is considered weak by modern standards. So there is the possibility of undetected and uncorrected corruption, but I don't know how probable it is.
I'm also confused by RFC 793's reference to "header and text" below. I can't tell what the word "text" is referring to. It seems like the checksum may only be checking TCP header info and not the data portion of the packet. Or does "text" in fact refer to the data portion of the packet? http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793 As long as the TCPs continue to function properly and the internet system does not become completely partitioned, no transmission errors will affect the correct delivery of data. TCP recovers from internet communication system errors. Checksum: 16 bits The checksum field is the 16 bit one's complement of the one's complement sum of all 16 bit words in the header and text. If a segment contains an odd number of header and text octets to be checksummed, the last octet is padded on the right with zeros to form a 16 bit word for checksum purposes. The pad is not transmitted as part of the segment. While computing the checksum, the checksum field itself is replaced with zeros. Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
