Re: Smallest Transit MTU

[John Kristoff <jtk () northwestern edu>]

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:00:22 -0500
"Robert E.Seastrom" <rs () seastrom com> wrote:

> A naive reader might think from Dan's posting that the Internet didn't
> work at all before ECN was codified (experimental with RFC 2481 in
> January 1999 and standards-track with RFC 3168 in September 2001).
[...]
> ECN has always looked to me like a solution in search of a problem,
> which may be why so few people have their panties in a bunch over
> non-support of it.

It's not just that ECN isn't supported that is the problem, it's when
systems by default reject packets with reserved bits set.   While you
may pan ECN, it or something else that might enhance Internet protocols
like it in the future should typically be silently ignored by end hosts
that don't understand them so those experiments can at least take place.

  <ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/bcp/bcp60.txt>

I also suspect that a very small population of users who would benefit
from ECN are hanging out in places like NANOG so your view of ECN
desirability may be limited.

John