Re: The IPv4 Internet MTU

[Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us>]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, james woodyatt wrote:

> I have a radical proposal: how about we tell the stateful packet filter users 
> that it's their own damned fault if their filters break their favorite 
> applications, and that they can either fix their broken filters or they can 
> turn them off?

While I'm as sympathetic as the next guy to a good net.purist rant, if we 
want to find real solutions (where real is defined as useful for actual 
users) we need to look at the real problems.

99.9% of home users who go to Fry's and buy a Netgear/Linksys/D-Link
or whatever "home router" don't have any idea what stateful packet 
filtering, PMTUD, or a lot of other things mean, and they shouldn't have 
to. It's unfortunate that PMTUD is broken on most of the IPv4 internet, 
but if we're going to do better with IPv6 we have to play the hand we've 
been dealt.

Doug

--

	If you're never wrong, you're not trying hard enough