MTU Problem an Airport Extreme

There is no user method to change the MTU on the base station. The MTU is negotiated by the base station with remote destinations for each connection. It’s a calculation done as needed between hosts on the internet. According to spec there is no reason to change the MTU. The TCP session for getting a web page should start with a request to the server for data, and then the server starts sending large packets of data. If a router between the two hosts (the base station and the web server) can’t pass a packet that large for some reason it should reply to the sender of the over-large packet (webserver) and tell the web server to step the packet size down to xxx.

The same would happen if the base station was sending up large chunks of data to a remote site and a router in between couldn’t handle the large chunks. This is all transparent and usually happens flawlessly. The failure occurs if a router in the middle of a session doesn’t reply to the sender that it can’t handle packets of a certain size. The sender is never told to send smaller packets, and the destination never receives the packets, and the connection would fail. This is called an „MTU black hole“.

A couple relevant topics on MTU.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107488
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107474

(aus macuser.de)

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