Subject: Re: [Bugme-new] [Bug 14837] New: gretap does not fragment IP packets

From: Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:47:00 -0800

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:32:09 -0800
Andrew Morton <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > 
> > The expected behavior would be that the encapsulated packet be fragmented. The
> > observed behavior is that any encapsulated packets over 1500 bytes are simply
> > dropped and an ICMP "fragmentation needed" message is sent to ... who knows.
> > 
> > My feeling is that DF bit is not playing nice here.
> >   

TCP uses DF bit to do path mtu discovery.  If your firewall et all, doesn't
do ICMP correctly, then this is the classic TCP path MTU discovery ICMP
blackhole problem. 

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2923.txt