I was watching a Chris Greer video and he often refers to stacks albeit IP or TCP or otherwise.
So my query is simple, are these 'stacks' lets say TCP, built by developers per application, or OS ..?
Thanks
(btw i'm hooked)
Stack is rather what it means in the English language.
UDP or TCP lies on top of IP.
Hardly anyone writes IP, UDP or TCP code. Most use some API or socket touse it in their code. So it is usually part of the OS.
Thank you for clarifying - my query actually stemmed from looking for 'Timestamps' in one pcap. All the timestamps I see are in square brackets which of course means Wireshark did it.
RFC6191 addresses problems associated with TIME_WAIT which is something I am investigating atm. There is another thread I posted few days ago regarding port reuse.
Anyway, its early days but the problem seems to be connected with ISP, and enabling 'dual-stack' appears to have fixed the problem. Its early days, further testing is ongoing, stay tuned here for confirmation !
Even though not strictly required the so called network stack is usually provided as part of the Operating System. It's an highly integrated and optimized part using OS and sometimes network hardware features to provide a so called socket API. This socket API abstracts all details related to the network protocol handling (e.g., TCP/IP) , and makes it much easier for the application programmer to use.
Otoh, it is possible to program your own network protocol stack. Then you would need to use so-called raw sockets, which connect directly to the underlying data link layer, e.g., Ethernet. But then you would still compete with the OS based network stack, so integration into a system would not be easy. Therefore you hardly ever see network stacks outside the OS's being used.
Comments