RE: hotmail not dealing with ECN

RE: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Randal, Phil]

James Sutherland wrote:

> Except you can't retry without ECN, because DaveM wants to do 
> a Microsoft and force ECN on everyone, whether they like it
> or not. If ECN is so wonderful, why doesn't anybody actually
> WANT to use it anyway?

And there's the rub.  Whether ECN is wonderful or not, attempting
to force it on everyone, whether they like it or not, whether
(for whatever reason) they are able to upgrade their firewalls
to handle ECN appropriately or not, is a recipe for a "Great
Linux Public Relations Disaster".

Because if we do try to force it, the response which will come
back won't be "Linux is wonderful, it conforms to the standards".
It will be "Linux sucks, we can't connect to xyz.com with it (or
we can't connect because to xyz.com they run it)".

We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.

Just my 2p worth,

Phil

(speaking for myself and not my employer)

---------------------------------------------
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK
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Re: RE: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Lars Marowsky-Bree]

On 2001-01-26T16:04:03,
   "Randal, Phil" <prandal@herefordshire.gov.uk> said:

> We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
> arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.

So you also turn of PMTU and just set the MTU to 200 bytes because broken
firewalls may drop ICMP ?

Sincerely,
    Lars Marowsky-Brée <lmb@suse.de>

-- 
Perfection is our goal, excellence will be tolerated. -- J. Yahl

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Re: RE: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[James Sutherland]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:

> On 2001-01-26T16:04:03,
>    "Randal, Phil" <prandal@herefordshire.gov.uk> said:
> 
> > We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
> > arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.
> 
> So you also turn of PMTU and just set the MTU to 200 bytes because broken
> firewalls may drop ICMP ?

No - a workaround is used to detect such "black holes". Much as I was
advocating for ECN, in fact. Also note that some firewalls (Microsoft's in
particular) DO drop ICMP packets.


James.

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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Daniel Chemko]

Microsoft are bad for dropping ICMP because of security.. .I mean try pinging
microsoft.com...



James Sutherland wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
>
> > On 2001-01-26T16:04:03,
> >    "Randal, Phil" <prandal@herefordshire.gov.uk> said:
> >
> > > We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
> > > arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.
> >
> > So you also turn of PMTU and just set the MTU to 200 bytes because broken
> > firewalls may drop ICMP ?
>
> No - a workaround is used to detect such "black holes". Much as I was
> advocating for ECN, in fact. Also note that some firewalls (Microsoft's in
> particular) DO drop ICMP packets.
>
> James.
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Chris Meadors]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Daniel Chemko wrote:

> Microsoft are bad for dropping ICMP because of security.. .I mean try pinging
> microsoft.com...

It's down, ha ha, Microsoft is down!  I'm joking of course.  But you don't
know how many times my techs have told me that.  It's either that, or
something is seeming a little strange on our network, and to trouble
shoot, they ping microsoft.com and don't get a responce.  Then they call
me at home, to tell me that our T1s are down.

I wonder how much bandwidth was used up by people pinging MS to trouble
shoot when they still allowed ICMP packets through.

-Chris
-- 
Two penguins were walking on an iceberg.  The first penguin said to the
second, "you look like you are wearing a tuxedo."  The second penguin
said, "I might be..."                         --David Lynch, Twin Peaks

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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Thunder from the hill]

Chris Meadors wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Daniel Chemko wrote:
> 
> > Microsoft are bad for dropping ICMP because of security.. .I mean try pinging
> > microsoft.com...
> 
> It's down, ha ha, Microsoft is down!  I'm joking of course.  But you don't
> know how many times my techs have told me that.  It's either that, or
> something is seeming a little strange on our network, and to trouble
> shoot, they ping microsoft.com and don't get a responce.  Then they call
> me at home, to tell me that our T1s are down.
> 
> I wonder how much bandwidth was used up by people pinging MS to trouble
> shoot when they still allowed ICMP packets through.
That's why the nmap manual tells us to use -P0 to scan
www.microsoft.com.
Operating system guess returned some unix...

Thunder
---
Woah... I did a "cat /boot/vmlinuz >> /dev/audio" - and I think I heard
god...
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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Tony Hoyle]

Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> 
> So you also turn of PMTU and just set the MTU to 200 bytes because broken
> firewalls may drop ICMP ?

That doesn't affect huge numbers of websites.

In the UK two of the largest ISPs - BT Internet and Freeserve - have
ECN-blocking
firewalls.  So does theregister.co.uk for that matter.  If I enable ECN
I lose
the ability to send emails to a huge percentage of the people on the
mailing lists
that run on my machine.

These ISPs will *not* change simply because 1% of Linux users complain
at them.  They
have been contacted about this and they know of the problem.  I doubt
they care.

Firewalls dropping ICMP does not make my internet connection practically
unusable.  Firewalls
dropping ECN does.

Tony

-- 

The only secure computer is one that's unplugged, locked in a safe,
and buried 20 feet under the ground in a secret location... and i'm
not even too sure about that one"--Dennis Huges, FBI.

tmh@magenta-netlogic.com
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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Henning P. Schmiedehausen]

tmh@magenta-netlogic.com (Tony Hoyle) writes:

> These ISPs will *not* change simply because 1% of Linux users
> complain at them.  They have been contacted about this and they know
> of the problem.  I doubt they care.

Trust me, they care. Every Admin cares. They have, however, to convice
their superiors that upgrading two (three, five, twenty?) Firewall
boxes from a 99% running IOS into a newer, untested [1] version to
benefit 1% (1%? Oh, come on. 0.1% I would say) of their users from an
IETF experimental feature.

I wouldn't boot a box that runs 90 MBit/s traffic for 24/7 on such an
occasion.

You want ECN? Get DaveM to join Microsoft and push out MS Whistler
with ECN enabled and just an obscure Registry Entry to turn it
off. You will have ECN in a blink implemented everywhere.

	Regards
		Henning

[1] as in "inhouse tested and works". I would not trust Cisco Release
    Notes on such boxes. ;-)

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen       -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH     hps@intermeta.de

Am Schwabachgrund 22  Fon.: 09131 / 50654-0   info@intermeta.de
D-91054 Buckenhof     Fax.: 09131 / 50654-20   
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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Alan Cox]

> In the UK two of the largest ISPs - BT Internet and Freeserve - have
> ECN-blocking
> firewalls.  So does theregister.co.uk for that matter.  If I enable ECN
> I lose
> the ability to send emails to a huge percentage of the people on the
> mailing lists
> that run on my machine.
> 
> These ISPs will *not* change simply because 1% of Linux users complain

I suspect you do the freeserve guys a great disrespect (they host
ftp.linux.org.uk for one thing). If you've got traces showing what freeserve
stuff is mishandling ECN I'll have a chat with the right people

The Register can probably also be persuaded easily enough (make fun of them
on other sites as they make fun of incompetent IT sites and wait..)

BT well, there are reasons I don't even have a BT telephone line in my house.

Alan

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Re: RE: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Albert D. Cahalan]

>> We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
>> arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.
>
> So you also turn of PMTU and just set the MTU to 200 bytes
> because broken firewalls may drop ICMP ?

Nah, you don't need to go that low. Try 1200 or 1400 instead.


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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

In article <AFE36742FF57D411862500508BDE8DD055F6@mail.herefordshire.gov.uk>,
Randal, Phil <prandal@herefordshire.gov.uk> wrote:
>Because if we do try to force it, the response which will come
>back won't be "Linux is wonderful, it conforms to the standards".
>It will be "Linux sucks, we can't connect to xyz.com with it (or
>we can't connect because to xyz.com they run it)".

Who cares? Linux sucks, I can't connect to xyz.com with it because
it requires MSIE ....

Mike.

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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[David Ford]

"Randal, Phil" wrote:

> James Sutherland wrote:
>
> > Except you can't retry without ECN, because DaveM wants to do
> > a Microsoft and force ECN on everyone, whether they like it
> > or not. If ECN is so wonderful, why doesn't anybody actually
> > WANT to use it anyway?
>
> And there's the rub.  Whether ECN is wonderful or not, attempting
> to force it on everyone, whether they like it or not, whether
> (for whatever reason) they are able to upgrade their firewalls
> to handle ECN appropriately or not, is a recipe for a "Great
> Linux Public Relations Disaster".

Nobody is forcing you to use ECN, it is a compile time AND runtime option.

-d

--
  There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Thomas Jefferson
  The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Andrew S. Tanenbaum



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Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

[Helge Hafting]

"Randal, Phil" wrote:
> 
> James Sutherland wrote:
> 
> > Except you can't retry without ECN, because DaveM wants to do
> > a Microsoft and force ECN on everyone, whether they like it
> > or not. If ECN is so wonderful, why doesn't anybody actually
> > WANT to use it anyway?
> 
> And there's the rub.  Whether ECN is wonderful or not, attempting
> to force it on everyone, whether they like it or not, whether
> (for whatever reason) they are able to upgrade their firewalls
> to handle ECN appropriately or not, is a recipe for a "Great
> Linux Public Relations Disaster".
> 
> Because if we do try to force it, the response which will come
> back won't be "Linux is wonderful, it conforms to the standards".
> It will be "Linux sucks, we can't connect to xyz.com with it (or
> we can't connect because to xyz.com they run it)".
> 
> We may be right, "they" may be wrong, but in the real world
> arrogance rarely wins anyone friends.

This problem doesn't exist, because linux users don't need to
use ECN if they don't want to.  It is optional!  Those who
*care* about hotmail etc. can turn it off!  The only ones who get
ECN turned on is those who compile their own kernels.  They
have the skill to turn it off if they need.  The
distributions don't ship kernels with ECN default on.

Helge Hafting
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