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Re: error messages in shim6



On 2006-12-28 14:29, marcelo bagnulo braun wrote:
Iljitsch has brought up the following issue in his review:

More in general, most error conditions are handled by silently dropping packets, however, which is a very bad idea because that way, there is no difference between an error and lost messages. So in some cases, a host may continue to resend the offending packet because it doesn't know something went wrong. The main problem with this approach is that you can't debug it from one end: you need to see what happens on both ends to determine why something doesn't work.

Silently dropping packets because of errors is the right approach for security reasons in some cases, but I don't think this applies here. A short error message with an error code and optionally a human-readable message would be much better. As long as these error packets are smaller than the packets that trigger them, there should be little or no security impact, especially considering that we're prepared to talk shim with the correspondent in question to begin with.


his proposal as you can see is to include a shim6 error message to handle this situations... any opinions?

I would agree with Iljitsch for any case where the sender will indeed
continuously repeat the message unless there is a response. (Alternatively,
get rid of the continuous repeats some other way.)

    Brian