questions about FCIP connection failure detection

["Chong Peng" <ChongPeng@MaXXan.com>]

Hi, all

The Section 9.4 (TCP Connection Considerations) of draft-ietf-ips-fcovertcpip-09 
says:
 
   In idle mode, a TCP Connection "keep alive" option of TCP is
   normally used to keep a connection alive. However, this timeout is
   fairly large and may prevent early detection of loss of
   connectivity. In order to facilitate faster detection of loss of
   connectivity, FC Entities SHOULD implement some form of Fibre
   Channel connection failure detection (see FC-BB-2 [4]).
 
   When an FCIP Entity discovers that TCP connectivity has been lost,
   the FCIP Entity SHALL notify the FC Entity of the failure including
   information about the reason for the failure.

I have a couple of questions regarding this section:

1. The first pragraph states that the FC entity is responsable to discover the 
   connection failure. But the second paragraph implys the FCIP entity discovers 
   the connection failure first and then notifies the FC entity. Is there an 
   editorial error?
2. If we let the application protocol on the top of TCP to discover the 
   connection failure, what scheme are we going to use? Are we planning to
   define some "FCIP keep alive" frames in the future? I checked FC-BB-2,
   in the section related to discovery (13.2.2.4.2), it says "TBD".

Chong Peng


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