Re: time for TCP ECN defaulting to on?

From: Dave Hudson
Date: Tue Nov 04 2008 - 11:34:22 EST


Daniel J Blueman wrote:
Is it time to enable TCP ECN per default and get the benefits, since
router support has been around and known-about for really considerable
time?

Perhaps it should be a question of enabling it, and educating people
to disable it if they run into issues, since we'll probably be in the
same situation in 5 years...and it'll be some time before these
kernels hit devices/servers anyway.

Daniel

Unfortunately I think you'll find there are sufficiently large numbers of broken SOHO routers out there that if you try this you'll cause a lot of problems. The problems range from no connectivity to in a few extreme cases routers actually crashing or behaving in very unpredictable ways. Here's one summary that got presented to the IETF about 18 months ago:

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/07mar/slides/tsvarea-3/sld6.htm

When a clueless end-user gets a Linux-enabled netbook that crashes their router while their existing Vista or XP systems appear to work just fine then the Linux network stack will get the blame for being buggy, not the router :-(


Regards,
Dave


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