RE: Summary of responses so far and proposal moving forward [Was Re: [tcpm] Is this a problem?]

["Anantha Ramaiah (ananth)" <[e-mail]>]

 
> 
> > So I gather that there is no need to have a standards change, since 
> > you seem to say that RFC allows you to abort a connection which 
> > everyone is aware of. But it is the same RFC that says you MUST 
> > persist a connection indefinetly as long as you receive 
> ACKS, so you 
> > are now providing an external override for this MUST behaviour.
> 
> I think the relevant text is:
> 
>          4.2.2.17  Probing Zero Windows: RFC-793 Section 3.7, page 42
> 
>             Probing of zero (offered) windows MUST be supported.
> 
>             A TCP MAY keep its offered receive window closed
>             indefinitely.  As long as the receiving TCP continues to
>             send acknowledgments in response to the probe 
> segments, the
>             sending TCP MUST allow the connection to stay open.
> 
> TCP. Not the user. Users get to abort connections.
> 
>         4.2.2.13  Closing a Connection: RFC-793 Section 3.5
> 
>             A TCP connection may terminate in two ways: (1) the normal
>             TCP close sequence using a FIN handshake, and (2) 
> an "abort"
>             in which one or more RST segments are sent and the
>             connection state is immediately discarded.
> 
> FWIW.

I know I have read the above text many times, but there is an
inconsitency here. While it says that TCP MUST keep the persist
connection open, in the other hand it also says users can abort the
connection no matter what state it is in. So implementations can chose
to have some optimal schemes built inside TCP module on behalf of the
applications ( it is just a matter of programming/implementation) and
have an implicit timer inside TCP which kills the TCP connection when
timer expires and can inform the application about the connection death.

[All the above actions are compliant to the RFC since RFC doesn't talk
about how to implement TCP and it just gives a guidance, the term
user/application and TCP are just used to illustrate the concept.]

-Anantha
> 
> Joe
> 
> 


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