How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential

Re:How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential by hueving on Saturday November 21, 2015 @04:59PM (#10608185)

I used to thing this way before I realized it's just an arbitrary hoop you make people jump through. To you, people understanding TCP might be what you claim is a basic foundation. However, it's just about as arbitrary as asking people to explain 802.11 RTS/CTS or clos switch fabrics, which are both equally as important to delivering day-to-day network traffic. Additionally, they both can come up as things you need to understand when trying to optimize jitter/latency in sensitive local network traffic applications.

Don't judge people based on which components of networks they happened to take an interest in and dive into.

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Re:How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential by xxpor on Saturday November 21, 2015 @06:22PM (#10608444)

Part of the "problem" is that networks (even networks that span the globe) are too reliable these days. If a developer is developing network services, all they see is an input stream and an output stream. And that's all that matters 99% of the time. But add 0.1% loss, and all hell breaks lose because people don't understand the implications and rules governing the underlying protocols.

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Re:How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential by staticmalloc on Saturday November 21, 2015 @05:31PM (#10608296)

I learned a lot about TCP (including delayed acks), the basics of 802.11, and the basics of switching fabrics in my undergrad networking class, so I wouldn't say it's totally unrealistic for someone to talk a little about those topics, depending on the role.

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Re:How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential by sokoloff on Saturday November 21, 2015 @05:16PM (#10608254)

On the other extreme, I've seen people ask why is that IP address divided by 16? (10.0.0.0/16)

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Re:How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential by jacquesm on Saturday November 21, 2015 @06:11PM (#10608408)

And then you have to explain to them that it's divided by 2^16...

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