Been up to my elbows in TCP/IP mechanics today. Its all about the SYNs, FINs and ACKs. Oh, and the PSHes and RSTs. Its sometimes useful to understand that when you have a TCP/IP ‘connection’ to another computer, you really don’t. There is no tiny portion of the internet that becomes your personal hotline to the other machine. All a TCP/IP connection really is is an agreement between two machines that they will exchange packets in a certain way.

Lets say you open browser and point it at google. Before any of the HTTP fun happens, the following occurs:

You send a SYN.
Google sends a SYN & ACK together.
You send an ACK.
You are now ‘connected’.

Various flags and sequence numbers are contained in the packets that enable both parties to agree on how they will number their packets, and thus how they will spot any that don’t arrive or arrive out of sequence. Packet exchange occurs, with every packet sent being ACKed. An ACK can also piggyback on the next data packet if there happens to be one going out soon enough. When its time to end the conversation, the first party to hang up sends a FIN, then waits for an ACK and a corresponding FIN from the other party.

If one side crashes without sending a FIN then you get a ‘half open’ connection whereby one party thinks all is well, the other has no knowledge of a connection. As soon as either side attempts to send data (or a new SYN), the other party will know something is up and send a RST (reset) packet. This tells the recipient to abort and try it all again, so its back to the SYN, SYN+ACK, ACK shenanigans. Also known as the three-way handshake. So there you go, a 30 second introduction to the magic of TCP/IP.