MTU of the Internet?

Thu Feb 5 16:35:26 UTC 1998

On Wed, Feb 04, 1998 at 01:18:56PM -0500, Dennis Simpson wrote:
> 
> We recommend that clients who care about interactive response use small
> MTUs, and clients who care about download speed use higher MTUs.

There's an extremely annoying potential gotcha in having clients set
lower MTUs.  At least one release of Netscape's web server set the
Don't Fragment bit.  In the few cases we've seen, if there was not a 
1500 MTU pipe between server and client, the server could be reached,
but no HTML would be downloaded.  Usually it's easier to work around
the problem on the client end than convince the server admins they
might want change things on their end.

-- 
Jeff Stehman                     Senior Systems Administrator
stehman at southwind.net            SouthWind Internet Access, Inc.
voice: (316)263-7963             Wichita, KS