IP Fragmentation - Not reliable over the Internet?

Tue Aug 27 14:33:21 UTC 2013

On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:34:57 -0700, Owen DeLong said:
> That's a lot of questions he didn't ask.

This isn't your first rodeo.  You should know by now that the question
actually asked, the question *meant* to be asked, and the question that
actually needed answering are often 3 different things.

> If I send a packet out as a legitimate series of fragments, what is the chance
> that they will get dropped somewhere in the middle of the path between the
> emitting host and the receiving host?

> To my thinking, the answer to that question is basically "pretty close to 0 and
> if that changes in the core, very bad things will happen."

Saku Ytti and Emile Aben have numbers that say otherwise.  And there must
be a significantly bigger percentage of failures than "pretty close to 0",
or Path MTU Discovery wouldn't have a reputation of being next to useless.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 865 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20130827/58efead4/attachment.sig>