On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:58 -0700, Ross Werner wrote: > I think either you or I is confused as to what "best effort" is.
I have been using the term in more of an ad-hoc fashion. I understand your protestations a little better. I termed e-mail best effort, meaning the mail server tries really hard to deliver the e-mail, but there are no guaranties that it will be delivered successfully in a timely manner. If the mail is delivered successfully, we can be sure that the message was transmitted in its entirety to the remote server and you hear nothing back. This is not a a guarantee that the recipient received the e-mail though, merely that the other server claimed to receive it. And I referred to TCP/IP in a similar sense, in that a tcp connection will continue to retry packets until an acknowledgment is received or until a timeout occurs. Or if the remote machine is not available or not accepting packets, an icmp packet reports failure. To me that is best effort. Whereas IP alone just simply transmits packets with no regard to success or failure. IP packets do, as you alluded to, contain a checksum that can guarantee (relatively speaking) that if you have received a packet it is correct and in its entirety. It does make for interesting arguments when we haven't even agreed on the terminology. It's my fault of course, but then again not telling you my definitions gives me the egotistical edge. :) It's the secret to politics. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
