A good point. This document assumes a DNS context, and thus that the UDP request and response are self-contained. I will attempt to make it more clear in the text, but this is exactly the sort of caution I was trying to get at: do not assume that a hack that works in some circumstances for the DNS will work for other services. regards, Ted Hardie
On Tue, 30 Jan 2001 hardie@equinix.com wrote:
One potential problem with using shared unicast addresses is that routers forwarding traffic to them may have more than one available route, and those routes may, in fact, reach different instances of the shared unicast address. Because UDP is self-contained, UDP traffic from a single source reaching different instances presents no problem. TCP traffic, in contrast, may fail or present
That should be a little more precise.
TCP packets can not (for all practical purposes when dealing with "normal" clients) be self contained.
UDP packets are self contained, from the network view.
But that does not mean that a particular protocol implemented on top of UDP will necessarily still be self contained, merely that it is possible for it to be.