philip@beeblebrox.dle.dg.com (Philip Gladstone) (11/19/90)
Havard Eidnes writes: > The Host Requirements state > that a host implementation of TCP MUST NOT do this (specifically: the ICMPs > net unreachable, host unreachable or source route failed should be > considered temporary failures and not permanent conditions). Some gateways > have the ability to turn off the sending of ICMP net unreachables, but this > is just a workaround for "broken" host implementations. I have found that most implementations of TCP/IP do not return net/host unreachable messages even when they know that the path to the net/host is not available. Is this due to the existence of the 'broken' implementations as mentioned above? For example, on a lan which uses ARP, the host 'knows' that the remote machine is not present when the ARP request times out. At this point, it tends to drop the datagram. I would prefer to get back 'net unreachable' messages rather than the ubiquitous 'timeout' message. -- Philip Gladstone Development Lab Europe Data General, Cambridge England. +44 223-67600