When I ask for packet corruption, it appears that the number of packets being corrupted is low. Whats going on?
A random bit offset is calculated each time the corruption mechanism decides that a packet is to be corrupted. That offset may be anywhere in the entire Ethernet frame, not just the IP part of the packet. If the bit that is changed is within the source MAC address (48-bits/6-bytes) then the packet will still reach the intended target computer. If the receiving machine or its software is not overly zealous about checking consistency between source MAC address and source IP address, then the packet will be accepted and the change in the source MAC address may not be noticed. The chance that the corruption will occur within the source MAC address varies depending on the overall size of the packet. That chance is greater for small packets and less for larger packets. For small packets, typical of ICMP Echo (ping), which are typically 60 bytes, then the chance that the bit corruption will occur in the source MAC field can be as high as 10%. This, in turn, means that the perceived loss of pa
Related Questions
- I created a ping packet in Simulation Mode and ran it. Why do I still see packets/frames (like CDP) running on the network after the ping process is completed?
- While downloading and executing an applet, there is no action but a gray rectangle box appears in the browser. Whats going on?
- When my docking dialog is docked to the bottom of my MDI application the status bar appears to be above. What is going on?
