Question

Mixed MTU environment

Asked by: medent

I am working with network card vendor (Broadcom) who is telling me that all the hosts that communicate with my server (and are directly connected on the same physical network) must have matching MTU's. This causes problems for my servers which I ran at an MTU of 1300. I run my servers at that MTU to best accomodate various 3rd party vpn routers that I often need to deal with; however, this in turn creates issues for MTU-1500 hosts that send me packets over 1300 in size.
The thing that bothers me the most is that other network cards do not act the same (for example Intel), where I can set MTU=1300 and receive packets up to 1500 is size. In fact the older versions of the Broadcom driver also worked fine in a mixed MTU environment.
I can understand the MTU would effect the size of packet I send, but I do not understand why that has to limit the size of packet that I am able to receive?

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Asked On: 2007-07-19 at 04:58:00ID22706641
Tags: mtu
Topics: Linux
,; Miscellaneous Networking
,; Linux Networking
Participating Experts: 3
Points: 500
Comments: 16

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