Subject: [rddp] Mysterious Middleboxes ?

From: Parag Bhide <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 16:02:26 -0800

The "middle boxes" seem to appear in every discussion on MPA alignment and
marker discussions and rightly so.

Will it be possible for someone to describe these "middle-boxes" in terms
of,  what are they ? What network configurations/topologies do they exist ?
Why they re-segment the TCP byte streams ? etc. This will help me (and
likes) to understand the discussion and see if these middle-boxes exist for
"real" in given applications of (my ;-)) interest.

This will really help.

Thanks

Parag.
Aarohi Communications, Inc.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 11:36 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [rddp] MPA draft serious issues
> 
> Some suggestions about the serious technical
> issues I pointed the WG at yesterday.  These are with my WG
> Chair hat off - take them or leave them as you see fit.
> 
> (1) Do middleboxes justify the marker impact on the design?
> 
> Assertions of what hypothetical middleboxes could do
> don't seem particularly helpful, as the real issues are
> what middleboxes do in practice and how common that sort of
> (mis)behavior is likely to be - are these going to be more like
> NATs, whose widespread deployment has forced protocols such
> as IPsec to cope with them despite the ugliness of doing so, or
> more like a hypothetical router that aggressively and arbitrarily
> reorders traffic passing through it?  The latter would never be
> deployed to any serious extent due to its awful interactions with
> TCP, and hence isn't worth doing serious protocol design for.
> 
> While I'm not thrilled about it, following SCTP's approach
> of using IP fragmentation when forced to retransmit a framed
> ULPDU that won't fit into a reduced PMTU is not out of the
> question if maintaining alignment for the benefit of receivers
> is really important.
> 
 
> Thanks,
> --David
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------
> David L. Black, Senior Technologist
> EMC Corporation, 176 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
> +1 (508) 293-7953 **NEW**     FAX: +1 (508) 293-7786
> [email-masked]        Mobile: +1 (978) 394-7754
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