Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

H. Peter Anvin
2001-01-26T17:58:53Z

"Adam J. Richter" wrote:
>
> I am surprised that anyone is seriously considering denying
> service to sites that do not implement an _experimental_ facility
> and have firewalls that try to play things safe by dropping packets
> which have 1's in bit positions that in the RFC "must be zero."
>
> If Microsoft were to do this with their favorite experimental
> network extensions for msnbc.com, how do you think the non-Microsoft
> world would feel and react? Well, that's about how the rest of
> the world is likely to view this.
>
> That said, I wonder if some tweak to the Linux networking
> stack is possible whereby it would automatically disable ECN and retry
> on per socket basis if the connection establishment otherwise seems to
> be timing out. This may be tricky given that the purpose of this
> facility is congestion notification, but, if someone is smart enough
> to be able to implement this, it would provide a much less disruptive
> migration path for adoption across firewalls that drop these packets.
> Far more sites could then safely activate this feature without limiting
> the hosts that they can reach.
>
> Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
> adam@yggdrasil.com \ / San Jose, California 95129-1034
> +1 408 261-6630 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
> fax +1 408 261-6631 "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."

Ummm... we already went over this. The fundamental problem is that they
aren't dropping the packets, they are sending RST.

-hpa

--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."