nanog mailing list archives
should TCPs do MTU black hole detection?
From: Vern Paxson <vern () ee lbl gov>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 14:40:01 PST
The IETF's tcp-impl (TCP implementation) working group has a draft document discussing problems with path MTU discovery: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tcpimpl-pmtud-02.txt The main issue we're trying to decide is whether the draft should advocate "black hole detection". That is, when a TCP is doing PMTU discovery, but somewhere the necessary ICMPs are either not being generated or are being filtered out before the TCP receives them, the TCP notices that it's losing multiple packets of the same size, so it then tries sending smaller segments, even though it hasn't received a "Datagram Too Big" ICMP. The plus of black hole detection is that it can work around a sometimes very hard to debug problem. The minus is that it masks problems that should instead be fixed. To help resolve this issue, I'm wondering whether the ISP community has a clear preference for either yes-do-detection or no-we-want-the-problems-fixed. Comments appreciated. Thanks, Vern
Current thread:
- should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Vern Paxson (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Alex P. Rudnev (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Chris Cappuccio (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Randy Bush (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Jeff Mcadams (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Randy Bush (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Greg A. Woods (Nov 19)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Randy Bush (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Alex P. Rudnev (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Randy Bush (Nov 18)
- Re: should TCPs do MTU black hole detection? Dave Morton (Nov 19)