Brian Candler wrote:
As an observation: when you ifconfig ng0, you can't set separate "transmit
MTU" and "receive MTU". So I imagine that the configured MTU only applies to
outbound datagrams, i.e. it means "don't transmit any datagram larger than
this on this interface". If ng0 were to *receive* a datagram larger than the
MTU I don't know for sure what would happen, but given that it was
successfully received, I see no reason why the kernel should discard it.
Right.. the kernel will happily receive any size packet that shows up.
In any case, in the FreeBSD -> WinXP direction, you say we could send 1400
byte packets out the ng0 interface, but this is not necessarily true. What
is the MRU that the WinXP machine asked for? If it's 1400, then the ng0
interface must definitely be < 1400, because of PPP overhead (e.g., IPCP).
The 1400 negiotiated by LCP applies to PPP frame payload, not IP size.
I think you're mistaken; see here in RFC 1661
The PPP MTU and the IP interface MTU can be the same only as long as
there is no intermediate protocol doing compression or encryption.
Even VJ compression has overhead (I think). So this is not necessarily
true in general. You're right though that if straight IPCP is being used
then PPP MTU == IP MTU.
So yes you're right, if FreeBSD is going to choose an MTU of 1376 in step
1c, then it could propose an MRU of 1376 in step 2a, so that Windows would
choose an MSS of 1376-40.
However I don't see how it could do this (easily), since it would have to
wait until it has finished negotiating the MRU from WinXP (step 1a/1b)
before it could even offer an MRU in the opposite direction (step 2a).
It actually wouldn't be hard.. we'd just send another Config-Request,
forcing a renegotiation with the smaller value.
Alternately, one could implement the "MSS hack" that is implemented in
ppp(8) and mpd that does a transparent "fixup" of the MSS as it flys by.
This does seem to be a lot of hoops to jump through, when you could simply
fix step 1c: if the WinXP machine says it can receive 1400-byte datagrams,
then configure the interface to send it datagrams of up to 1400 bytes!
Well, this didn't work at one time. It may now in a SP2 world... so then
this boils down to which brokenness (WinXP or the PIX) do you label as
the real problem and which do you label as the unfortunate circumstance
that we should work around. Since there's no right answer, it should
be left up to the user to (re)configure as needed.
-Archie
__________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs * CTO, Awarix * http://www.awarix.com
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