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Date:      Mon, 29 Jan 1996 15:11:06 +0100 (MET)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        davidg@Root.COM
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Why RFC1323 is disabled on freefall and freebsd.cdrom.com ?
Message-ID:  <199601291411.PAA05532@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <199601291134.DAA00305@Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Jan 29, 96 03:33:41 am

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> >1) extensions (really, TCP options) are negotiated. If the server
> >   does _not_ request for possibly unknown extensions, but merely
> >   respond to incoming requests, I do not see how this could do
> >   any harm.  I don't know if FreeBSD requests for extensions even
> >   in the LISTEN state, but disabling this should require trivial
> >   changes to the kernel (and it would probably be a good idea to
> >   implement such a behaviour).
> 
>    The problem isn't the negotiation - this happens just fine. The problem is
> with certain terminal servers that won't pass packets with TCP options in
> them. The options negotiation succeeds, but all the packets from that point on
> are dropped.

For the negotiation to succeed it requires an RFC1323 client, which
sends a packets _with options_ asking for whatever extension he
wants, the reply _with options_ should go through, and only at this
point you have a failure.

This means that the (potential) failure rate is going to increase
with time, as the number of RFC1323 clients increases and "certain
terminal servers" are not upgraded because nobody realizes the
problem.

Anyways, as I said in my previous email, your policy is perfectly
reasonable and denotes great care towards customer satisfaction.

> >Note however that the two sites that do use RFC1323 are large
> >servers, comparable (or larger) to ftp.cdrom.com. And the second
> >one is a commercial site, so they are quite interested in letting
> >everybody in without troubles.
> 
>    Yes, but wcarchive is the largest FTP site in the world. We likely have 10
> times the traffic (or more!) of those other sites. I don't think you realize
> just how much traffic wcarchive has each day.

I don't question your word. I just want to point out that people
at unix.hensa.ac.uk (and wwwcache.hensa.ac.uk, a national web proxy)
say that they serve over 1 million web documents per day, so they
might have scalability and interoperability problems similar to
yours.

Two differences, perhaps:
* www documents are often smaller than ftp, and just one per
  connection, so it's hard to make a comparison of the traffic;

* they mostly serve UK clients, so they might have a different view of
  the world (read: thei might not have to deal with the same
  brokenesses).

	Luigi
====================================================================
Luigi Rizzo                     Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it       Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533              via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522              http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
====================================================================



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