On Sat, 2007-08-18 at 11:24 -0500, Brad Bendily wrote:
> On 8/17/07, Greg Gowins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > No, the clients that can't connect do not have any mention of ECN
> > (explicit congestion notification) in the Wireshark traces.
> 
> Have you tried to give a problem machine the IP of a working machine?
> To narrow down whether it's in the firewall or the workstation?

I rather doubt that it is IP-address related. The firewall ruleset
treats the working and non-working addresses identically.

In my experience, problems that affect some web sites but not others are
either ECN- or Path MTU- related. Since we've ruled out ECN, I think
that the problem has to do with the ersatz MTU (1492) on eth1. I suspect
that replacing CLAMPMSS=Yes with CLAMPMSS=1452 (or lower) in
shorewall.conf would correct the problem (as would configuring eth1 and
all of the hosts on that LAN with the same MTU).

MTU-related problems occur because complete idiots sometime masquerade
as network administrators. These fools somehow believe that all ICMP
packets are evil and must be prevented at any cost from passing through
the routers that they administer. In so doing, they break path MTU
discovery and cause grief for the rest of us. The Netfilter TCPMSS
target (which CLAMPMSS uses) is netfilter's tool for working around the
effects of these administrators' stupidity.

CLAMPMSS=Yes works well if the outgoing interface's MTU is smaller than
the local LAN's. In this case, however, it is the local interface that
has the smaller MTU so CLAMPMSS=<mss> is the proper solution. The value
is calculated as the smallest MTU in the client<->server path minus 40;
hence, I recommended CLAMPMSS=1452.

A word of warning. Greg is running Shorewall 3.0.4.  In that version (in
fact, in all versions up to 4.0.2), Setting CLAMPMSS=<mss> could
actually *increase* the MSS setting in a packet.

-Tom
-- 
Tom Eastep    \ Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool
Shoreline,     \ http://shorewall.net
Washington USA  \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Public Key   \ https://lists.shorewall.net/teastep.pgp.key

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