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From: ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz (George Michaelson)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: partial transfer recovery in RFC and OSI protocols
Message-ID: <2240@bunyip.cc.uq.oz>
Date: 22 Dec 89 00:40:06 GMT
References: <8912181856.AA00428@bel.isi.edu>
Sender: news@bunyip.cc.uq.oz
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postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU writes:

>George Michaelson:
>Please read the specification of FTP, RFC-959.  See section 3.5 on error
>recovery and restart, and read about the REST (restart) command.

Yes, I should have RTFS, I'm sorry. I made the mistake of treating a
BSD-ism as evidence of what an RFC would contain.

I hope the various schemes for solving this problem come together into
a workable whole. To re-iterate, the ACSnet experience of having this
capability embedded in the transport layer is very positive, the costs
are sufficiently marginal to make overheads acceptable on good links,
the benefits on slow noisy ones are immense. I need hardly add that by
doing it low down the stack ALL upper layer activity can potentially
take advantage of it, whereas a feature like REST is application specific. 

Rick Adams suggestion of working on the network order octetstream seems
pretty close to what ACS is achieving, and has the benefit of being
very simple in concept. 

Thankyou to everyone who emailed me to point out the RFC was not at fault...

	-George

Internet: G.Michaelson@cc.uq.oz.au                     Phone: +61 7 377 4079
  Postal: George Michaelson, Prentice Computer Centre
          Queensland University, St Lucia, QLD Australia 4067.