Re: [pmtud] Re: [dccp] PMTU issues

[Eddie Kohler <kohler@icir.org>]

[ post by non-subscriber.  with the massive amount of spam, it is easy to miss
  and therefore delete posts by non-subscribers.  if you wish to regularly
  post from an address that is not subscribed to this mailing list, send a
  message to <listname>-owner@ops.ietf.org and ask to have the alternate
  address added to the list of addresses from which submissions are
  automatically accepted. ]

> Since then, we have seen the boom and subsequent bust of the
> Internet revolution. It would be a far stretch to say that this all
> came as result of the path MTU discovery decisions, but I do
> believe it fair to say that a harmful precedent was set:  ...

> So, where does this leave us today? We have an unreliable,
> untrustworthy (and, frankly, noisy) network-based mechanism
> that only works when forwarding nodes get involved with
> inspecting IPv4 packet headers.  ...

Well, I wouldn't want to be responsible for any further destruction of the
Internet revolution, but most of this seems besides the point.  Old-style
PMTUD, which *depended* on the delivery of ICMPs, is a far cry from
new-style PMTUD, which *can benefit* from the delivery of ICMPs.  The
problem was the PMTU algorithm, not the idea of ICMPs.  And the network
isn't full of useless ICMPs.

Eddie