[e2e] RFI: Microsoft accused of TCP standards violation

[Marc Slemko]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, David P. Reed wrote:

> The following was shared with me and is making the rounds on
> slashdot.   Before I do the work to verify/refute this, has anyone from e2e
> any input?   I'm personally slightly skeptical that this is correct (though
> of course I'd be really concerned if it were).

Wow, what a huge amount of technical garbage in that whole /. thread.
What else is new.

This speculation is all based off:

	http://grotto11.com/blog/slash.html?+1039831658

I think someone just got confused because they didn't understand
TCP very well, and didn't understand that IIS defaults to keeping
persistent connections open indefinitely (ie. no timeout) if there
are ample connections available on the server, and didn't understand
that even if you think you have closed IE, you really haven't.  So
sure, a persistent connection will stick around when some people don't
expect it.

The optimization that IIS does to not stick an arbitrary hard
timeout on persistent connections isn't a bad one as far as I can
figure.  (the ugly thing is that they provide no way to force a
limit, and don't even provide any option to disable persistent
connections, but that is another story)

Now, it may be that there is a bug in IE and/or some versions of
windows that prevents it in some situations from properly noticing
that the persistent connection has been shutdown by a server (IIS
or otherwise), resulting it in trying to send a packet on the no longer
open connection, but that is a far cry from the wild claims being made.

My quick test with W2K and IE5.5 didn't show that, but there are a lot
of combinations of IE versions and Windows versions etc.