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From: karn@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  ICMP messages
Message-ID: <8702241742.AA10186@flash.bellcore.com>
Date: Tue, 24-Feb-87 12:42:10 EST
Article-I.D.: flash.8702241742.AA10186
Posted: Tue Feb 24 12:42:10 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Feb-87 01:34:21 EST
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Approved: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa

Granted, sendmail is royally screwed up and it shouldn't deliver a partial
message.  But I still think that TCP shouldn't give up so easily.  Most of
our network outages are caused by one of several things: our Telenet X.25
interface wedges, csnet-relay's IMP interface wedges (speculation), and/or
our route drops out of the EGP tables.  If TCP just kept trying but backing
off on each retransmission, it wouldn't have to start over when service
resumes, our load on the network would decrease, and sendmail wouldn't have
to contend with message fragments in the first place.  Needless to say, this
also implies disabling the TCP keepalive feature that was hacked into BSD.

Phil