Re: Fwd: Minutes / Notes

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>

    > the question should not be whether TCP connections should be able to
    > survive link failures - because clearly there are some kinds of link
    > failures that cannot possibly be survived.
    > A better question is: How long should an application be able to expect
    > a TCP connection to last without needing to implement its own
    > ack/retransmit/duplicate-suppression logic? My view is that a TCP
    > connection should not become a significant additional source of
    > failure. So it be able to last as long as its endpoints are likely to
    > stay "up"

Aren't these two points in opposition to each other?

You can't expect a TCP connection to survive a link failure - but TCP
connections should stay up as long as the endpoints are up?

Or are you assuming that the time between link failures is much, much higher
than endpoint uptimes? I can tell you from experience (getting to MIT from
here in VA) that that's not true! :-)

	Noel