[e2e] UDP checksum field?

[Craig Partridge]

In message <200504041733.KAA26987 at gra.isi.edu>, Bob Braden writes:

>  *> explaining exactly the problem and urging the TNS checksum be implemented
 >.  No
>  *> response ever came back, and, if you look at a TNS packet today, the chec
 >ksum
>  *> is still zero.  I guess no one has used the gateway software who cares ab
 >out
>  *> their data.  :]
>  *> 
>  *> Alex
>  *> 
>
>Or, the incidence of (detected) failures is so low that no one cares.

I vaguely recall that some part of BBN had experience with the NSF
checksum problem and that it took a while for the corruption of the
filesystem to become visible.  That is, errors are infrequent enough
that NIC (or switch, or whatever, ...) testing doesn't typically catch
them.  So bit rot is slow and subtle -- and when you find it, much has
been trashed (especially if one ignores early warning signs, such as
large compilations occasionally failing with unrepeatable loading/compilation
errors).

Craig