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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Is the Internet usable for wide-area interactive conversations?
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.224840.22007@Think.COM>
Date: 18 Jun 91 22:48:40 GMT
References: <2039.Jun1803.33.1391@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Jun18.173511.7510@milton.u.washington.edu>
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Reply-To: barmar@think.com
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
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In article <1991Jun18.173511.7510@milton.u.washington.edu> mrc@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
>In article <2039.Jun1803.33.1391@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>>Keep in mind that an active TCP connection---e.g., a remote login---dies
>>the second that the network becomes unreachable.
>The above statement is only true with certain broken versions of BSD
>TCP software.  It is not true on other operating systems; nor is it
>true on fixed versions of BSD (you can thank me for nagging NeXT to
>fix it).

Unfortunately, some of the most popular BSD derivatives still have this
bug.  I think it may still be in SunOS.

Also, BSD is not the only system with this bug.  Symbolics Genera also has
it.  And even though the Symbolics error signalling system makes it much
easier for an application to recognize and handle this error gracefully,
none of them seem to.
-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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