jbvb@VAX.FTP.COM (James Van Bokkelen) (05/04/89)
Re: ICMP port unreachable: It is quite convenient to be able to give up on a domain name lookup or an NFS mount when you get the ICMP error back indicating that no server is running. "Black Hole" style failure modes are a bane to network maintainers and software support personnel, so we've put considerable effort into making as many errors as we can visible to the user. Re: "never seen a datagram lost on a LAN" I have. Admittedly, most of them have been due to fast vs. slow network interfaces, but I also have seen cables swamped by broadcast wars, the massive collision caused by a whole NFS cluster seeing an RWHO packet at the same time, Ethernets where the cable was a little out of spec (too long) where 1 in 10 packets were lost, etc. etc. If you own the LAN on which software which expects no datagrams to be lost runs, I suppose it's your own lookout, but I'd never consider *selling* such a design. jbvb