TCPMSS is not restricted to mangle table

Patrick McHardy kaber at trash.net
Tue Dec 6 06:12:31 CET 2005


Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 
>> Thanks, I didn't know this, I'm going to change this to refer to
>> the mangle table. This still leaves the option of a warning, but
>> want I really wanted to know was whether anyone cares. From a
>> consistency point of view it should be restricted, for the
>> functionality it doesn't matter.
> 
> 
>  From consumer (of your code) point of view, I do care.  The current 
> documentation was clearly encouraging (by example) use of TCPMSS from 
> filter table.  My guess is that majority of production systems using 
> TCPMSS target are using it from filter table.  If the only reason is 
> consistency (nothing is going to be fixed by the change, and nothing is 
> going to be broken by leaving it as is), a warning now (in manual page, 
> right next to the example) and change on next major kernel release (2.7) 
> might be the best approach.  I'd leave things as is for 2.6 series of 
> kernels.

I agree. Just to make it clear, I do not intend to break it for no
good reason. I was just surprised that when trying to unload it
after flushing the mangle table there was still one reference left
(from the debian ppp ip-up script). There is one potential reason
to change it, packet classification algorithms like nf-hipac have
an easier job if they can rely on certain conditions, like no
changing of the packet in the filter table. But for now I've only
updated the man-page.



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