Study

The OSI model

Card 2 of 12

A switch reports a rising count of frames failing their frame check sequence. What has that CRC actually established?

Answer

The frames were corrupted in transit; the check detects the damage but does not repair it

A cyclic redundancy check is a detection mechanism. It tells the receiver that the bits it holds are not the bits that were sent, and that is the end of its contribution — recovering the data is somebody else’s job, usually a higher layer’s retransmission. Reordering is a transport concern and has nothing to do with the frame check sequence. Flooding an unknown destination is a forwarding decision made from the MAC address table, which is a separate mechanism that a failing CRC says nothing about.

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