Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!decwrl!apple!bbn.com!craig
From: craig@bbn.com (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Keep-Alive within TCP
Message-ID: <59344@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 7 Sep 90 11:49:32 GMT
References: <1990Sep7.002637.6209@ingres.Ingres.COM>
Sender: news@bbn.com
Reply-To: craig@ws6.nnsc.nsf.net.BBN.COM (Craig Partridge)
Distribution: na
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 17

In article <1990Sep7.002637.6209@ingres.Ingres.COM> cmorris@ws2s.Ingres.COM (Colin Morris) writes:
>Having served my four-year sentence in the ISO TP4 world, I've suddenly been
>unleashed on TCP. To my great surprise, I understand not all TCP
>implementations support "keep-alive". For example, SUN's PC-NFS version
>of TCP appears not to. How widespread a "problem" is this? What well-known
>implementations don't support this?

    Why is lack of keep-alives a problem? In principle, unless an application
tries to send data, why ping the network to see if the route is up (if the
route is down, it may come up again before you send more data)?

Craig Partridge
Vice-Chairman, I Hate Keep-Alives Association

[For those not in the know, Phil Karn is chair of the IHKAA, and Mike
Padlipsky is founder, previous-chair, and honorary fellow.  We oughta
make T-shirts some time... :-)]