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Date:      Wed, 17 Apr 1996 13:12:53 -0400
From:      dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
To:        Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: TCP Window question
Message-ID:  <199604171712.NAA15988@etinc.com>

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>dennis stands accused of saying:
>> 
>> Now for the more important question: Does anyone care to hazzard a guess as
>> to the pct of "broken" implementations that will reject (or choke on)  "out
>> of sequence" packets?
>
>*laugh*  That depends on the market you're looking at.  If you're referring
>to Unix stacks, almost zero, and you'd have to go back a long way to find
>them.  
>
>The out-of-order reassembly handling is necessary to handle lost or
>corrupted packets.  Any system that choked on such a circumstance would
>do so as soon as an ethernet collision killed a passing TCP fragment.

This seems obvious, but I'm wondering what all the ruckus is about as
there is a lot of complaining about certain vendors "load balancing"
techniques that send packets out of sequence fairly regularly. It seems
that theres more than 1 implementation out there that will discard out
of sequence packets thus requiring a retrans. It doesnt make too much 
difference, as the goal of any good technique would be to minimize the
occurrance...but Id like to find a broken one to test with....

Dennis
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