Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!prlb2!kulcs!dannyb
From: dannyb@kulcs.UUCP (Danny Backx)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: TLI sockets comparison (paper promised).
Message-ID: <1062@kulcs.UUCP>
Date: 3 Dec 87 08:46:11 GMT
References: <21852@lll-tis.arpa>
Organization: Kath.Univ.Leuven, Comp. Sc., Belgium
Lines: 47
Keywords: TLI sockets
Summary: questions about TLI versus sockets



Narayan,

After studying your paper on TLI/sockets comparison, I had some questions
and remarks.
Since no-one else came up with them (to my great surprise), I decided
to post them :

1. You talk about receiving data in the t_listen primitive.
   I'm not sure I understand this.
   What's the difference between that, and reading the first bunch of data
   send over the connection ?

2. You are quite correct in stating the lack of a choise in the accept-primitive
   for sockets.
   It remains to be seen whether this feature is useful, though.
   I can't think of many situations where one would want to reorder the
   connection attempts, for giving priority to some-one specific maybe ???

   What you CAN do with the socket interface is accepting the connections one
   by one, then looking who is on the other side, and closing the
   connection immediately if you don't like that guy.

3. I see the inability of TLI to determine who it's talking to as a grave
   shortcoming.
   This could have been the basis of a lot of protection schemes.
   (See above.)
   I feel it is quite elementary to be able to obtain that information.

4. Why would anyone want to send partial records ?
   You can always write buffering routines, very much like stdio, to
   simulate sending partial packets in the application, while the transport
   interface always gets complete packets.
   (This is really a LOW level and application dependent matter, which
   shouldn't be mixed with transport level stuff.)

I would appreciate your comments.

		Danny

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 Danny Backx                            |  mail: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 
 Tel: +32 16 200656 x 3537              |        Dept. Computer Science
 E-mail: dannyb@kulcs.UUCP              |        Celestijnenlaan 200 A
         ... mcvax!prlb2!kulcs!dannyb   |        B-3030 Leuven
         dannyb@kulcs.BITNET            |        Belgium