On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 10:24:52AM -0700, Mike Hunter scratched on the wall:
> On Aug 05, "Andrew Craick" wrote:
>
> > We're running a flow-stat -f32 -n -S3 and the output is displayed in
> > Octects. Can somone confirm that octects definetly equals bytes in this
> > situation. If so, if i wanted to convert 41525421960 octets into Gigabytes
> > i would get 38.6 Gbytes. ((41525421960 / 1024)/1024)/1024 = 38.6 Gigbytes.
>
> Looks good to me. "Octets" is what the networking community uses to refer
> to 8-bit bytes. I suspect that this came about when some architecture
> people started talking about 16 bit bytes for fancy 16 bit processors, but
> that usage has died off and I've never heard anybody intentionally say
> that their byte has something other than 8 bits.
Actually, it dates back to the very early days of networking when
eight-bit bytes were not a hard and solid standard like they are today.
"Byte" was a somewhat arbitrary base unit of memory that was
hardware/processor dependent (although many machines back then didn't
have "processors," but rather board and boards of explicit logic
circuits); there were 8-bit/byte machines, as well as 10 and even 13 bit
machines. The exact size was often determined by the physical size
of the computers, and the amount of transistors and/or core-memory
modules they could fit into a given space.
Since networking systems had to inter-operate with all of these
different types of systems, you'll commonly see networking items
defined in "octets," which is quite specific about being an
eight-bit byte.
These days, of course, you'd be hard pressed to find a machine that
didn't use eight-bit bytes, but the term remains strong in most
networking standards and documentation.
> My Freshman CS Professor referred once to a "nibble"...4 bits! :)
That's pretty standard, although not very common, usage.
-j
--
Jay A. Kreibich | CommTech, Emrg Net Tech Svcs
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Campus IT & Edu Svcs
<http://www.uiuc.edu/~jak> | University of Illinois at U/C
_______________________________________________
Flow-tools mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mailman.splintered.net/mailman/listinfo/flow-tools
