Re: ECN: Clearing the air (fwd)

[David Lang]

I am behind a raptor firewall and ran the test that David M posted a
couple days ago and was able to sucessfully connect to his test machine.

so either raptor tolorates ECN (at least in the verion I am running) or
the test was not valid.

David Lang

On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, jamal wrote:

> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 11:15:24 -0500 (EST)
> From: jamal <[e-mail]>
> To: James Sutherland <[e-mail]>
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: ECN: Clearing the air (fwd)
>
>
>
> On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, James Sutherland wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, jamal wrote:
> > > There were people who made the suggestion that TCP should retry after a
> > > RST because it "might be an anti-ECN path"
> >
> > That depends what you mean by "retry"; I wanted the ability to attempt a
> > non-ECN connection. i.e. if I'm a mailserver, and try connecting to one of
> > Hotmail's MX hosts with ECN, I'll get RST every time. I would like to be
> > able to retry with ECN disabled for that connection.
> >
>
> We are allowing two rules to be broken, one is RFC 793 which
> clearly and unambigously defines what a RST means. the second is
> the firewall or IDS box which clearly is in violation.
> The simplest thing in this chaos is to fix the firewall because it is in
> violation to begin with.
> I think it is silly to try to be "robust against RSTs" because of ECN.
> What if the RST was genuine?
>
> I see that we mostly have philosphical differences. You'd rather adapt
> to the criminal and most people would rather have the criminal adjust to
> society.
>
> I think CISCO have been very good in responding fast. I blame the site
> owners who dont want to go beyond their 9-5 job and upgrade their boxes.
> In the old internet where only hackers were qualified for such jobs, the
> upgrade would have happened by now at hotmail. I suppose it's part of
> growing pains.
> If you think the CISCOs were bad sending RSTs, i am sure you havent heard
> about the Raptor firewalls. They dont even bother to send you anything if
> you have ECN enabled ;-> Simply swallow your SYNs.
> So tell me, what do you propose we deal with these? Do we further
> disambiguate or assume the packet was lost?
> I actually bothered calling Raptor, they chose to ignore me.
>
> You should never ASSume anything about something that is "reserved".
> I posted the definition from the collegiate dictionary, but i am sure most
> dictionaries would give the same definition.
>
> It's too bad we end up defining protocols using English. We should use
> mathematical equations to remove any ambiguity ;->
>
> cheers,
> jamal
>
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