[DGD] Archive

[David Jackson]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 17:28 -0400, Neuromancer wrote:

> Did you recently enable "explicit congestion notification"?  I run linux
> here and have to disable that temporarily to access those pages with:
> echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn
> 
> Some explanation from the linux kernel config:
> TCP Explicit Congestion Notification support
> CONFIG_INET_ECN
> Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) allows routers to notify
> clients about network congestion, resulting in fewer dropped packets
> and increased network performance.  This option adds ECN support to
> the Linux kernel, as well as a sysctl (/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn)
> which allows ECN support to be disabled at runtime.
> 
> Note that, on the Internet, there are many broken firewalls which
> refuse connections from ECN-enabled machines, and it may be a while
> before these firewalls are fixed.  Until then, to access a site
> behind such a firewall (some of which are major sites, at the time
> of this writing) you will have to disable this option, either by
> saying N now or by using the sysctl.
>                                                                     Russ

I read this, and my first thought was;

Which is broken, ECN or the firewalls?  

I'm in complete support for enhancing network performance, but a
solution which doesn't handle fault/error conditions (such as "broken"
firewalls) and which older, existing servers will refuse a connection
to; that sounds pretty broken to me.  

I run Linux as well.

David 

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