nanog mailing list archives

Re: Minimum Internet MTU


From: itojun () itojun org (Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 08:33:24 +0900 (JST)


I'm working with a few folks on firewall and IDS rules that will flag
suspicious fragmented traffic. I know the legal minimum of a
non-terminal fragment is 28 bytes, but given non-terminals should
reflect the MTU of the topologies along the link, this number is far
lower than what I expect you should see for legitimate fragmentation in
the wild.

A few years back I noted some 512-536 MTU links in ASIA. I've been doing
some testing and can't seem to find them anymore. Is is safe to assume
that 99.9% of the Internet is running on 1500 MTU or higher these days? 

        there are many deployment of DSL-based layer 2 providers, which
        use L2TP (or whatever) tunnelling as well as PPPoE to associate
        end clients to layer 3 ISPs.  they enforce MTU like 1450 or lower.  
        in Japan, NTT east/west (NTT is a previously-government-owned telco)
        provide such service and enforce MTU of 1454.

itojun


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