Clint Chaplin wrote: >> there is NOBODY working in IETF for whom familiarity with IP, including >> IPv6, is not essential. >> whether they realize this is a different question. but you cannot do >> competent work in IETF without a basic understanding of the TCP/IP >> protocol stack. > adsl mib > enum > geopriv > mediactrl > speechsc > emu > kitten > ltans > openpgp > pkix my point stands. participants in all of these groups need to understand basics of the TCP/IP protocol stack (including UDP). for instance, you can't write a decent MIB without understanding how SNMP works and to do that you need to understand the consequences of its design choices (including how it uses UDP). similarly, you can't do a competent job designing new DNS records or using existing ones without understanding the protocol limitations of DNS, which follow to a large degree from quirks in IP and UDP. You certainly can't do competent Internet security work without understanding how the information is going to be packetized, routed, and sent around the network, and reassembled - i.e. without understanding IP. I once had a working group where the participants insisted that they layer everything on top of HTTP because they didn't understand TCP and weren't willing to learn. They didn't even really understand HTTP or its limitations, for instance, in being pretty much a remote-procedure-call mechanism (which has certain inherent inefficiencies) or being poor at handling asychronous notifications (which they needed). All they knew was that HTTP had APIs that they could call. And they didn't know how to use those. And what they produced was a disaster. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf