Subject: Re: TCP RDMA option to accelerate NFS, CIFS, SCSI, etc.

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 08:05:34 +0000 (GMT)

On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Vernon Schryver wrote:

> > From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
> 
> > > A draft describing the TCP RDMA option can be found at:
> > > ftp://ftpeng.cisco.com/pub/rdma/draft-csapuntz-tcprdma-00.txt

If this _was_ a draft, it would be available from
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

(and I imagine that it wouldn't go against RFC2026, or be copyright
Cisco. I see that e.g.
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-satran-scot-00.txt
has similar wording. How widespread is this practice?)

> > There is no DNS entry for ftpeng.cisco.com so I can't access the document.
> 
> ftpeng.cisco.com resolves for me to 198.92.30.33, and the URL works

It's an alias for ftp-eng.
there doesn't appear to be a reverse DNS entry, though.

> ftpeng.cisco.com does not answer ICMP Echo-Requests.  It also seems that
> Cisco is filtering ICMP TTL Exceeded.
> 
> Oh, well.  I predict that soon traceroute and ping will be as
> effective as if the Internet were run by the old line telco managers
> who went great lengths to keep their technical problems quite.

Bear in mind that both traceroute and ping were effective one-person
opportunistic hacks based on using an existing infrastructure in
unexpected ways.

If they'd first been tediously designed by a committee, standardised
and mandated, things might be different. they probably wouldn't work
as well, but they'd be on buzzword-compliant feature lists.

> I'm even less impressed about the proposal than Erik Nordmark,

Note the mentions of SCSI and SCSI/TCP and the tie-in with the
proposed IP Storage efforts (recent ietf general list discussion).

I'd still like to know _why_.

L.

SCSI DMA over TCP? What _is_ all this aiming for - trying to build
distributed RAID arrays with really poor performance that are subject
to WAN outages and DoS attacks?

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>