The IP over ATM Mailing List Archive by date

[Mark Laubach <laubach@terra.com21.com>]

> Mark,
> 	If i understand this right some of our current implementations
> would not be compatible with new revised RFC1577. If an implementation
> used the length as an offset to get to the next field, but the field
> existed being zero-filled with the length indicating zero, we would get the
> wrong field. Why don't we pad the fields, leave the length to indicate
> the length of the field even if it zero-filled and use the operation to 
> determine which field is relevant?

Well, that to me sounds like it will generate its own set of problems. 
The lengths were put into the ATMARP packet to indicated the presence and
length of the associated address in support of a variable length packet
following the DNS query and reply model.  I'm not in favor personally, 
of using the opcode to determine packet format.

Mark