Old backend/frontend protocol versions

Hello everybody.

I'm Daniel Varela, the developer of DBBalancer, a load balancing connection 
pool for PostgreSQL (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/dbbalancer), and 
I've recently been faced to a problem with protocol versions. DBBalancer 
speaks itself Postgres protocol to open and close connections, while 
forwarding all other messages. Currently implements protocol version 2.0, as 
defined in the documentation.

The problem appeared when using DBBalancer with PostgreSQL and PHP installed 
from Debian packages, as a tcpdump capture identified a StartUp packet like 
this:

00 00 01 28 04 d2 16 2f ...

According to the protocol specification the first four bytes are the length 
of the packet (ok), but the next four should be the protocol version....

What I would like to know, since the lack of documentation (at least I 
couldn't find any) of previous versions of the protocol is:

a) Is this really a previous version of the protocol?
b) Is it worth to implement it in DBBalancer?
c) If it is, where could I find documentation about it? I know that the 
source code "somewhat" documents it, but it would be very very time saving to 
have access to some docs.

Best regards and thanks in advance.



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Regards from Spain.  Daniel Varela
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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.          -Derek Bok (Former Harvard President)