On Mon 28 Jan 2002 at 15:36:54 -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> I think we should not do this.  If we let users tweak the timeouts,
> rather than following the normative TCP behaviour (for, e.g., RTT
> estimators), then users can trick our our TCP into generating
> non-TCP-like network flows. That's generally a Bad Thing.

I think one thing could be desirable: to "kick" a connection to get it
to do a single retransmit. KA9Q-NOS (which I hacked on to make an Amiga
version (RhiNOS)) has such a feature. It is very useful if a connection
was broken for a longer time, and now it is available again, but TCP has
not caught on yet because it has backed off to a long retransmission
timeout.

Or perhaps this condition could be discovered automatically somehow, but
that requires too much routing knowledge I fear.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert - rhialto@polder --They that can give up essential 
\X/ land.nl --liberty to purchase a little temporary safety
--------------deserve neither liberty or safety. - Benjamin Franklin, 1759
---People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that
---Benjamin Franklin said it first. - Unknown