Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

James Sutherland
2001-01-26T13:52:58Z

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, David S. Miller wrote:

>
> James Sutherland writes:
> > A delayed retry without ECN might be a good compromise...
> >
> > Every single connection to ECN-broken sites would work as normal - it
> > would just take an extra few seconds. Instead of "Hotmail doesn't
> > work!" it becomes "Hrm... Hotmail is fscking slow, but Yahoo is fine. I'll
> > use Yahoo". A few million of those, and suddenly Hotmail isn't so hot...
>
> No, as explained in previous emails, no retry scheme can work.
>
> Hotmails failing machines, for example, send RST packets back when
> they see ECN. Ignoring valid TCP RST frames is unacceptable and
> Linux will not do that as long as I am maintaining it.

I was not suggesting ignoring these. OTOH, there is no reason to treat an
RST packet as "go away and never ever send traffic to this host again" -
i.e. trying another TCP connection, this time with ECN disabled, would be
acceptable.

James.