RE: TCP keepalive seems to send to only one port

["David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com>]

> On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 04:19:31PM -0800, David Schwartz wrote:

> > > This means that keepalive is useless for keeping alive more than
> > > one connection
> > > to a given host.

> > 	Actually, keepalive is useless for keeping connections
> > alive anyway. It's
> > very badly named. It's purpose is to detect dead peers, not keep peers
> > alive.
>
> Then what do you do when you are behind a NAT?

	If the administrator of the NAT meant for you to have a permanent mapping,
she would have put one there. Using keepalives to hold a NAT entry open
indefinitely without activity would be considered abuse in most NAT
configurations. The NAT might not consider a keepalive to be activity anyway
(arguably, it shouldn't).

> And how do you
> expire entries in
> ESTABLISHED state that could stay lingering forever without some sort of
> keepalive? (The FINs might have been lost due to a conectivity
> transient, so
> you can have another perfectly valid and alive connection with
> the same host,
> and application-level timeouts are useless for some applications
> (*cough*nc*cough*))

	I don't understand this argument. First you demonstrate the need for
application-level timeouts, then you say application-level timeouts are
useless. Actually, your first argument is correct, protocols layered on top
of TCP that don't provide for timeouts are defective.

	DS

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