Iljitsch;
On 12-dec-03, at 22:24, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
Does that mean that Path MTU was badly designed, because it failed to
take into account stupid firewalls?
Yes, PMTUD was badly designed.
Path MTU disovery was implemented very poorly because implementations
tend expect certain functionality in routers, and usually don't recover
when this functionality is absent. (For whatever reason.)
No, it is not an implementation issue.
It is not a good design to periodically send a large packet
expecting it is larger than the current path MTU and dropped.
It should have been designed into TCP over IPv4 and should have
never set don't fragment bit. TCP should be able to know that
packets are reassembled at the IP layer.
IPv6 was badly designed. IPv6 should never use PMTUD and TCP over
IPv6 should work with PMTU of 1280, unless it gets OOB information
that all the pathes have larger MTU. An alternative was to let routers
record MTU, say, in flow label field.
Masataka Ohta