Technical Summary:
This document calls for an option to all TCP endpoints to
request peers to set the user-timeout to a particular value.
The motivation behind this option is hosts that understand that
they will be unavailable for a lengthy period of time and can
thus inform their peer of this phenomenon such that the peer can
prevent the normal connection aborting procedures from reaping
the connection. The information is advisory and therefore the
peer is still able to abort the connection (e.g., in times of
resource contention).
Working Group Summary
Given that the information exchanged is advisory, the TCPM WG
has consensus that this option is perfectly reasonable.
Document Quality
The document was reviewed for quality by a large number of TCPM
WG members.
Personel
Responsible AD was Magnus Westerlund. WG shepherd is Wesley Eddy.
Note to RFC Editor
New paragraph as the second paragraph in section 4.1:
Implementations may want to exchange UTO options on the very first data
segments after the three-way handshake to determine if such a middlebox
exists on the path. When segments carrying UTO options are persistently
lost, an implementation should turn off the use of UTO for the connection.
When the connection itself is reset, an implementation may be able to
transparently re-establish another connection instance that does not use
UTO before any application data has been successfully exchanged.