The MPLS WG Archive

[schultz@io.iol.unh.edu]

Hello,

I am experiencing difficulty understanding the following piece of the
RSVP-TE draft (from section 4.7.3):

"The contents of the Session Name field are a string, typically of
display-able characters.  The Length MUST always be a multiple of 4 and
MUST be at least 8.  For an object length that is not a multiple of 4, the
object is padded with trailing NULL characters.  The Name Length field
contains the actual string length."

There are 2 issues here:

1. I interpret "Length" in the second sentence to mean object length.  Is
that correct?  Or is it name length?

2. Isn't the session name field padded with NULL characters and not
the object length field?

My understanding of object length fields is that they are always multiples
of 4.  Is this object length field an exception?  I would think that the
pad characters would be included in an object length field or the parser
would not work.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,
-Ben