In message <20070108101249.GA9473_at_fysh.org>, Zefram writes:
>Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>>Firstly, I agree with Steve when he asks "why bother?". You're solving the
>>wrong problem.
>
>Conciseness is useful for network protocols.
On the other hand, one should not forget that the OSI protocols was
killed by conciseness to the point of obscurity.
And next thing, somebody is going to argue for GZIP encoding of the
list, and next thing you know, all programs need to drag libz in
to uncompress their leap-second table.
The major part of the InterNets success was that you could telnet
to pratically all servers, FTP, SMTP, NNTP etc, and you could see
what went on without a protocol analyzer with a price-tag of $CALL
>the limiting factor: CPU speed and bulk storage sizes have been
>increasing faster. An NTPv3 packet is only 48 octets of UDP payload;
>if a leap second table is to be disseminated in the same packets then
>we really do want to think about the format nybble by nybble.
No we don't.
We certainly don't want to transmit the leap-second table with every
single NTP packet, because, as a result, we would need to examine
it every time to see if something changed.
Furthermore, you will not getaround a strong signature on the
leap-second table, because if anyone can inject a leap-second table
on the internet, there is no end to how much fun they could have.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Mon Jan 08 2007 - 02:33:50 PST