Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!uwvax!speedy!stuart
From: stuart@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Stuart Friedberg)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: simultaneous connections
Message-ID: <6467@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 14 Oct 88 16:31:15 GMT
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: stuart@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Stuart Friedberg)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 20

In article <[A.ISI.EDU]13-Oct-88.01:57:40.CERF> CERF@A.ISI.EDU writes:
>I do not know whether any distributed systems in the Internet take 
>advantage of the TCP design feature but at the time of its design,
>TCP held symmetry to be a highly valuable characteristic.
>
>Vint Cerf

I am using the "active-active" connection protocol as the starting
point for (re)configuring distributed programs under remote control.
A "third-party" makes the decisions about who talks to whom, then
instructs the workers to establish a connection.

Master/slave introduces a completely unnecessary asymmetry into a peer
relationship between worker programs.  The "master" is the third-party
manager, which doesn't have anything to do with the TCP connection
itself, at all.  So, we are using the symmetric variant, and I am
quite thankful that the TCP design group (committee? mob? clique?)
provided it.

Stu Friedberg  stuart@cs.wisc.edu