ietf-nntp Requirement for timeout close unclear

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> Section 4 of the current draft has the following text:
> 
>     An NNTP server MAY have an inactivity autologout timer. Such a timer
>     MUST be of at least three minutes duration.  The receipt of any
>     command from the client during that interval SHOULD suffice to reset
>     the autologout timer.  When the timer expires, the server should close
>     the TCP connection without sending any response to the client.
> 
> In that final sentence, should that "should" be a "SHOULD"?  If not, could
> the wording be changed to something like "it is recommended that the
> server close..." or the like to make it clearer that it's not a protocol
> requirement?

There's a number of issues to be addressed concerning timeouts. As you
point out in another message, there's timeouts after an intermediate
response. Andrew Gierth also asked, a long while ago, for a different
timeout for the first command from a client.

And should the client have timeout restrictions as well ?

> I reviewed the previous list discussion of this section of the draft as
> best I could without re-reading the entire archives, and while there's one
> comment from Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at> in 1998 on this
> area, I don't see any additional discussion.  It's not clear to me why
> there's a requirement that the server not send any response to the client;

Because at this point both state machines should be expecting the client to
send to the server, and we don't yet have anything in place to address
pipelining.

We actually say that servers should give a 400 response to any command if
they need to terminate the connection, or a 401 to give advance warning. I
wouldn't object to us saying that the server MAY send a 400 (or 404,
perhaps, since that code is unused ?) to mean a timeout-drop, provided that
we also note that the client might not see it.

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