There are many times that people have asked questions *on this list* that could 
have been solved with a rudimentary knowledge of how networking protocols work, 
and what are pre-requisites for a particular protocol or application to work.

For IIS, there are always many questions on whether a problem is with TLS/SSL, 
HTTP, or even something that's broken within an application. Understanding that 
there are layers (or pre-requisites) enables one to devise tests or gather 
evidence (e.g. packet captures) to determine at what point the problem is 
occurring, then postulate a theory on what's broken. Without that 
understanding, all you can go is attempt random "fixes" or changes in an 
attempt to solve the problem.

I think it's quite clear from this conversation that you don't see any value in 
this framework. Others do (I find OSI quite helpful, as well as normalisation, 
and OOP, and many other frameworks). The net is that no one is going to change 
anyone else's mind, so I think we should leave it at that.

Devil's advocate: :-)
As for Newtonian laws being 99% accurate - it's still a flawed model. So, where 
exactly is your boundary? Models that are fundamentally wrong, but make good 
approximations for human interaction are OK, but models that don't have 
real-world implementation (but have no inherent flaws) are somehow "not 
scientific" and "flawed"? Interesting argument :-)

Cheers
Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, 31 May 2010 4:23 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: Applicability of the OSI model (was: Big Changes)

Sigh.

Newtonian physics works to several 9's of accuracy, and is good enough for 
almost everything that humans encounter. That's a whole different beast than 
the OSI stack, where, unless I'm thoroughly confused, the only thing that's 
even close to widely used that somewhat follows that model is X.400.

Tell me - when was the last time in your memory where you thought something 
like "Oh, this is operating at layer 5 instead of layer 6 or layer 4"?

Kurt

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 23:14, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well, if that's your only argument, then no one should be using Newtonian 
> physics, because it's "not scientific", it's a flawed model, and it fools us 
> into thinking something that isn't so... But last time I checked, Newtown's 
> laws of motion were good enough to put man on the moon. And it still gets 
> taught in science classes all around the world.
>
> Cheers
> Ken
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Monday, 31 May 2010 1:46 PM
> To: NT System Admin Issues
> Subject: Re: Applicability of the OSI model (was: Big Changes)
>
> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 13:06, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> The 4-layer TCP/IP model makes a better model, because it's closer 
>>> to what's actually used.
>>
>>  Way to not respond to anything I or anyone else wrote.
>>
>>  It appears your entire argument is "OSI isn't TCP/IP".  I could 
>> reiterate my entire post, and also touch on what some other people 
>> wrote, but if seems like you're not listening and won't respond, so I 
>> don't see the point.
>
> Well then, to expand upon my thoughts:
>
> Using a model that bears little relationship to reality is a faux pas, and 
> likely to lead you to bad conclusions. There are also dangers involved in 
> adding layers to a conceptual model of networking, as described in RFC3439 
> (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3439).
>
> It ain't scientific.
>
> I believe it's better to acknowledge that everything above layer 3 is a bunch 
> of different protocols, some of which stand alone and some of which are 
> encapsulated in other protocols, than to use a flawed model and fool 
> ourselves into thinking something that isn't so.
>
> Kurt
>
>
> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ 
> <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ 
<http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~


~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~

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