[NNTP] draft-ietf-nntpext-tls-nntp-02.txt

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Fri Oct 1 05:01:03 PDT 2004


Jeffrey M. Vinocur said:
> IIRC, this was because any case where the server can unilaterally close 
> the connection makes me worried about a naive client inadvertently 
> DOS'ing the server.

Indeed.

> I mean, if the client author isn't prepared for a unilateral 
> termination to be purposeful (rather than a network glitch dropping the 
> connection), the client software might immediately reconnect and repeat 
> the same sequence of commands, causing the server to unilaterally 
> terminate again, and so on, indefinitely.

I see this as a concern.

And this is why we have the 400 response - to indicate *purposeful*
termination rather than accidental.

> Regardless, I do feel like we're misleading to client authors if the 
> spec says only "the server will reject all further commands" when in 
> practice servers are quite likely to close the connection, even if 
> somewhere in a different document we warn them that the server can 
> close the connection at any time.

So we say "the server will reject all further commands, which MAY
include issuing a 400 generic response".

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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