North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Thoughts on increasing MTUs on the internet

  • From: Stephen Sprunk
  • Date: Sat Apr 14 21:27:32 2007


Thus spake "Bill Stewart" <[email protected]>
One of my customers comments that he doesn't care about
jumbograms of 9K or 4K - what he really wants is to be sure the
networks support MTUs of at least 1600-1700 bytes, so that
various combinations of IPSEC, UDP-padding, PPPoE, etc.
don't break the real 1500-byte packets underneath.

This is a more realistic case, and support for "baby jumbos" of 2kB to 3kB is almost universal even on mid-range networking gear. However, the problems of getting it deployed are mostly the same, except one can take the end nodes out of the picture in the simplest case.


OTOH, if we had a viable solution to the variable-MTU mess in the first place, you could just upgrade every network to the largest MTU possible and hosts would figure out what the PMTU was and nobody would be sending 1500-byte packets; they'd be either something like 1400 bytes or 9000 bytes, depending on whether the path included segments that hadn't been upgraded yet...

S

Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS --Isaac Asimov