Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [PATCH] Improved support for MIPv4

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 10:26:59 -0700
Sebastien Tandel wrote:
3) there will be two additional fields shown, which will be clear (for packets formatted as per the older version of the spec, where those two
bits were reserved).

which will be presented as two bits with a semantic and in fact, had none for the old norm. That's what I wanted to point out.

Yes, but that's not an issue - that's what reserved fields are for. RFC 3344 says, about the bottom 8 bits of the 16-bit field (it's a 16-bit field even in RFC 3344), "Sent as zero; ignored on reception." (Hopefully, they made it clear that "sent as zero" means "MUST be sent as zero" and that "ignored on reception" means "current implementations should ignore them, but they might be used in the future, so future implementations might not ignore them, so we really mean it when we say 'MUST be sent as zero".)

I.e., a packet sent by code written to the older version of the spec isn't advertising UDP Tunnelling support - there was no UDP Tunnelling support in the older version of the spec, so if code was written to that older version of the spec, there's no UDP Tunnelling support code. Thus, the new U bit is correctly displayed for packets sent by code (correctly) written to the older version of the spec. (Code *in*correctly written to the older version of the spec, so that the U bit is set, could confuse recipients of those packets into thinking the machine supports UDP Tunnelling, so, again, it's correct to display that bit, so that it's obvious that the machine is advertising something it doesn't actually offer.)

The same applies to RFC 3543 and advertising Registration Revocation.

So, no, there's no need to control whether to display those to flags or not.