Re: maximum size of packets from client to server

[Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>]

der Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG> writes:

>When (if) 4254 is updated, that's a change I'd like to see; as it stands, it
>is entirely silent on the purpose of those fields, which strikes me as a bad
>idea for a formal spec.

Ditto.  My code's handling of this is:

  The SSH spec doesn't really explain the semantics of the server's response
  to the channel open command, in particular whether the returned data size
  parameters are merely a confirmation of the client's requested values or
  whether the server is allowed to further modify them to suit its own
  requirements (or perhaps one is for send and the other for receive?).  In
  the absence of any further guidance we just ignore the returned values,
  which seems to work for all deployed servers.

So my code treats the incoming size as being the same as the outgoing size, 
and so far has never run into problems.  I'd prefer to see this behaviour 
retained, since there doesn't seem to be anything making use of the capability 
for asymmetric sizes (or at least nothing I've run into), so explicitly 
introducing this is just going to add a pile of new exception and error states 
that need to be handled.

Peter.