[e2e] RST effect on socket buffers?

[Tristan Horn]

Hi all,

I find myself wrestling with a vendor to get their HTTP proxy's 
half-closed connection handling fixed.

One of the issues is that their hardware sends a spurious RST to the 
client after a 60 second timeout.  The effect is that any data remaining 
in the client TCP's receive buffer appears to vanish; the application is 
not able to read it.

My casual reading of RFC 793 suggests that this behavior is expected:
* a connection in e.g. ESTABLISHED state will transition to CLOSED upon 
  the receipt of a valid RST,
* "CLOSED" == "non-existent"

The vendor doesn't agree.  I also seem to only be able to replicate the 
problem on Windows, not e.g. Linux...

Can anyone shed light on what the expected behavior here is (if any)?

(No need to convince me that the untimely RST itself is broken, BTW -- I 
think/hope we've agreed on that point already.)

thanks!

-- 
Tristan Horn
Sr. Network Engineer
CollabNet, Inc.
+1 650 228-2567
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/attachments/20050104/216e1386/attachment.bin