Bug#3190: rlogin takes far too long when remote says Connection Refused

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

(debian-bugs removed from the CC while we resolve this)

Miquel van Smoorenburg writes ("Re: Bug#3190: rlogin takes far too long when remote says Connection Refused"):
...
> No, it is needed. Sometimes our login machine still thinks it has a socket
> open to the terminal server, while there isn't a socket open on the
> terminal server. Thus it can happen that the terminal server tries to
> connect from a source port of which the login machine thinks it is already
> in use. Result is ECONNREFUSED, and the code in the BSD source just
> does a sleep and retries on another port number.

This doesn't make sense to me.  Which end has what idea of which
connections are where ?

Even if you're right, I think there is some bug here that is being
worked around rather badly, surely ?

If you'd like to try to explain to me what's going on I'd be grateful.

Ian.