- From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 18:00:02 PDT
- To: Matthew_Squire@baynetworks.com (Matthew Squire)
- CC: www-http-ng-comments@w3.org
Hi, Matthew. Thanks for commenting. It may well be that for certain firewall configurations, you will want to restrict the kinds or varieties of MUX channels that are present behind a single TCP port for security purposes. That is, behind port 680 (or whatever), you have MUX channels with only HTTP-NG/TCWA servers behind them. However, this does not reduce the usefulness of MUX. Let's consider the `big 3' purposes of having MUX to begin with: 1) Multiple virtual circuits on top of a single TCP connection. This is to allow the congestion control algorithms to work again by reducing the number of actual TCP connections. Still useful even if a TCP port is restricted to HTTP/HTTP-NG. 2) Record-marking. That is, support for reliable sequenced datagrams over an underlying byte stream. Still useful. 3) Bi-directional streams over a single TCP connection. Still useful. In addition, by using HTTP-NG instead of HTTP, filtering based on protocol concerns should be considerably easier. Incidentally, an modified version of tcpdump that dumps MUX and HTTP-NG headers is available as ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/transient/janssen/tcpdump-3.4a6-rpc.tar.Z. Bill
Received on Friday, 24 July 1998 21:00:04 UTC