From owner-freebsd-stable  Mon Sep 24 13:43:53 2001
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To: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen)
Cc: Joe Abley <jabley@automagic.org>,
	Juha Saarinen <juha@saarinen.org>,
	"'Andrew Reilly'" <areilly@bigpond.net.au>,
	freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: 127/8 continued 
In-reply-to: Your message of "24 Sep 2001 13:00:58 PDT."
             <swr8swwe85.8sw@localhost.localdomain> 
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 13:43:40 -0700
From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net>
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> From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen)
> Date: 24 Sep 2001 13:00:58 -0700
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
> 
> Joe Abley <jabley@automagic.org> writes:
> 
> > RFC 1122, "Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers"
> > provides guidance for the interpretation of any address within
> > 127/8 -- it says such addresses are for use as "internal host loopback
> > addresses". RFC 1122 is STD 3, an Official Internet Protocol Standard,
> > and hence is worth complying with.
> 
> Are IANA/IETF/Internet standards EVER applicable to what goes on inside
> our computers?   Or just to the data crossing our Internet interfaces?
> (Not rhetorical - I'm wondering.)

No. This is explicitly stated in an early RFC (although I have no idea
which one any more). If it does not leave a system, no standard RFC is
relevant. That is one reason that the handling of 127/8 is limited to
the statement that it should not appear as a destination of any packet
leaving the system. 

So I guess the issue of responding to 127.1.1.1 is not a standards
issue. It's an implementation detail and Linux is as correct as
Solaris which is as correct as any other.

But letting a packet to a 127/8 address leave the system is clearly
wrong and Joe's PR will fix it nicely.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634


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