Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfro | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone spends their days digging through networking specifications. I for one earned CCENT and CCNA certifications was entirely unaware of this mechanism.

View on HN

maybe it just means those a pretty worthless certs focused on training you to shill for cisco instead of teaching you actually important network concepts...

No, it means I didn't spend any time on a random specification that will rarely be seen in a production environment. I feel I gained a lot of networking knowledge.

Not sure if you can call it “rarely”; it is very common in application programming. But it is never sent over the wire (unless there is some very buggy IP stack somewhere), which is probably why you did not encounter it in entry-level router/switch certifications.

If you are going to do weird shoot-self-foot things with writing custom EBF scripts to do ill advised network traffic manipulations things then it is probably a good idea to pay attention to RFCs.

I mean I have a small book of notes I built up based on various network RFCs and I am don't even have a CCENT and CCNA certifications.

This sort of thing isn't unreasonable.

Of course this isn't a dunk on the author of the article (except the part about doing weird DNS games, which sounds like a nightmare for whoever needs to figure out what he did months or years from now). Everybody has run into situations were they think they know how something works and it turns out they are wrong and get a nasty surprise from it.

What a bad faith response.

If you are searching for information about IPv6 (as the author of the post was doing for their endeavor) the Wikipedia page will be among the first things you will look at. And if the Wikipedia page clearly states this information then not only is it reasonable to expect someone to find it, but it's very far from "digging through specification"

...the author of the post linked a wikipedia article about the mechanism in their article. That is how they found out about it. What point are you even trying to make?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com