Linux Greatest Feature

Linux Greatest Feature

[Nolan Eakins]

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I just blogged this and thought it should be brought to your guys'
attention:

I want to bring more attention to this feature. As you may know I'm
stuck on lowly dialup that only costs me $6.95/month. One of the great
benefits of dialup is that I get disconnected periodically. This
wouldn't be worth blogging about if there wasn't something bugging me.
What's bothering me is that Linux DOES NOT disconnect those sockets,
while Windows does.

Since Windows is the pearl here, I'll describe what it does. Say I have
Psi and Thunderbird open, and I get disconnected. Windows immediately
tells them that their sockets are toast, and the application will try to
reconnect since it lost the connection.

Under Linux this doesn't happen. I get disconnected, and I have to wait
for the sockets to TIMEOUT. So I end up with Psi spewing things into a
blackhole, and Thunderbird flat out screws up and can barely function.

A long while back I made a post about this to the Linux PPP mailing
list. The reason that was laid out is that sockets and the devices are
in seperate layers so a socket doesn't know what device it is on. That's
nice if you have an ethernet cable powering a static IP, and you like to
unplug it just for shits. It's not so nice when you're on a dynamic IP
and well, those connections just don't make any sense anymore.

Regards,
Nolan Eakins

PS: Where can I get my penis enlargment and some spam?
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Re: Linux Greatest Feature

[Cristi Mitrana]

 hello, 

> Under Linux this doesn't happen. I get disconnected, and I have to wait
> for the sockets to TIMEOUT. So I end up with Psi spewing things into a
> blackhole, and Thunderbird flat out screws up and can barely function.
> 
> A long while back I made a post about this to the Linux PPP mailing
> list. The reason that was laid out is that sockets and the devices are
> in seperate layers so a socket doesn't know what device it is on. That's
> nice if you have an ethernet cable powering a static IP, and you like to
> unplug it just for shits. It's not so nice when you're on a dynamic IP
> and well, those connections just don't make any sense anymore.
>

 The behaviour you describe I see it as an advantage, it keeps your
connection 'up' even if the link goes down, say ppp disconects
accidentally and you have not finished transfering you files, ppp
connects and the link is up again, so the transfer continues without
interruption. This is ok for TCP/IP  connections, for some other this
might not be the case.
  The timeouts for the link to announce itself as 'down' can be
customized with the '/proc' (sysctl) interface, so you can customize
it. The linux kernel has by default a bigger timeout than MS Windows'
kernel/net stack so that's why you perceive the difference more
easily.

hth,
 mitu