a comment about the Messaging Association State Machine of draft-ietf-nsis-ntlp-14

Hello,
In the section 6.4 Messaging Association Processing, it is said "  
Timers  may also be necessary to detect connection failure (e.g. no  
incoming connection within a certain period), but these are not  
modelled explicitly". It would be better to add a timer explicitly to  
detect the connection failure. If TCP is used for the Messaging  
Association, we have to use a non-block connect() call. I found that  
most time, the connect() wouldn't finish the TCP connection right  
away. If we can add a timer to the state machine, we can retry to do  
the connect() call whenever the timer expires. If the connect()  
returns "EISCONN", that means the socket is connected. Then the state  
machine can transfer to Connected state. Otherwise we can just restart  
the timer.
It would be a better solution than just to use select() to wait for  
some time  after non-blocking connect() call.

In the rule 8 of the Responder Node Processing of section 6.3, "start  
Expire_RNode timer" is better to changed to "(re)start Expire_RNode  
timer".

Also Can anyone tell me when the Messaging Association state machine  
is created by the Responding Node?


Sincerely

Bo Gao

E-mail:[email protected]