A long time ago in an inter-network far, far away, some fundamental discoveries about packet switched networks were made. Too much of this is widely forgotten nowadays, or even marked as historic and obsolete. But the wisdom of the ancients is still relevant today. This page is an attempt to collect links to documents every network professional should truly understand and know by heart.
RFC 896: Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks
and a
proposed modification
to mitigate the effects of naive implementations of
delayed ACKs
on interactive applications like SSH
(Question for the reader:
should TCP delay ACKs for segments smaller than the MSS?
How about segments with the PSH flag set?)
RFC 970: On Packet Switches With Infinite Storage
(Note: in the meantime, time to live has been replaced
by hop count, invalidating the fundamental assumption of RFC
970, i.e., that the finite time to live of any IP packet would both
save the network and create an upper limit for used packet storage.)
End-to-End Arguments in System Design
(plain text version)
RFC 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet
It's the Latency, Stupid
(alternative link saved in wayback machine)
When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree
(alternative link
(via))
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