Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!oliveb!pyramid!athertn!joshua
From: joshua@athertn.Atherton.COM (Flame Bait)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: RDP questions
Message-ID: <13109@joshua.athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 28 Sep 89 05:17:17 GMT
Reply-To: joshua@Atherton.COM (Flame Bait)
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 36

Madness takes it toll....  

I'm looking at the RDP description (RFC908) with an eye towards implementing
it on top of email, instead of IP packets.  I chose it over VMTP (RFC1045)
because it seems simpler.  The RDP description is about half as long
as the VMTP description, and the RDP description contains very simple and
short descriptions of the data structures and algorithms used.  VMTP did
not seem to have these.  

Do have some questions about the protocol:

    Are there any known bugs in RDP as described in RFC 908?

    What is the difference between a closed connection, and a connection 
    which does not have a connection record at all?  It seems to me that 
    these are the same.

    Why can a packet not contain data and a RST (end of connection) flag?

    On a more general note, RDP only allows 256 ports and 4 versions.  These 
    limits seem a little low to me.  (They won't apply to my protocol though,
    since it will have port names, and any number of versions.  I'm mapping 
    fields in the RDP header into lines in an email header:
    X-REP-Source: source-port-name
    X-REP-Destination: destination-port-name
    X-REP-Version: 0
    and so on...)

BTW, the name for this project is REP, Reliable Email based Protocol, 
which is also short for REPTILE, which should describe its speed. :-)

Joshua Levy
--------                Quote: "Remember:  No matter how obnoxious it gets,
Addresses:                      you CANNOT execute a device!" -- Peter Franks
joshua@atherton.com          
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