Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!nosc!logicon.com!Makey
From: Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Reliable Datagram ??? Protocols
Message-ID: <827@logicon.com>
Date: 29 Oct 90 21:10:06 GMT
References: <9010221418.AA03839@ftp.com> <1990Oct24.090841@apollo.HP.COM> <1990Oct25.165545@envy.bellcore.com>
Organization: Logicon, Inc., San Diego, California
Lines: 24

In article <1990Oct25.165545@envy.bellcore.com> karn@thumper.bellcore.com writes:
>There's no reason
>that you shouldn't be able to send a series of SMTP commands in a
>single TCP segment and receive a series of responses, except that many
>SMTP servers inexplicably blow up when you try this. Given that TCP is
>supposed to be a reliable byte stream protocol, the designers of these
>systems must have gone well out of their way to keep this from working.

Five years ago, my internet host was a PDP-11/70 running PWB UNIX
(vintage 1978, for those who don't know their history).  The wonderful
folks at BBN had somehow managed to make this beast talk TCP/IP, and
had provided implementations of TELNET, FTP, and SMTP.  The SMTP code
blissfully assumed that every read() call would return exactly one
line of text, and this assumption was correct about 90% of the time.
Eventually I wanted the other 10% to work and I added buffering to the
SMTP daemon independent of TCP, but nobody had gone to any great
effort to produce the broken implementation; it was just plain old
lazy programming.

                           :: Jeff Makey

Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department
    Disclaimer: All opinions are strictly those of the author.
    Domain: Makey@Logicon.COM    UUCP: {ucsd,nosc}!snoopy!Makey