The Shell Game

Never thought you'd have to diddle with MTUs ever again, did you?04/04/2008 04:22:25 PM

Category : Domino

Location : At work

You know, back in the early days of TCP/IP with Windows... say, 1994, we get used to having to fart around with fairly low-level parameters like MTUs, packet fragmentation, TTL, all that. It's been years since we've had to fool with it in this era when everything from cars to refrigerators speak TCP/IP, but amusingly, it popped up again at work today. We all dusted off our brains to remember how to fix it.

Comments

1. chuck dean04/05/2008 12:01:43 AM
Homepage: http://www.lotussmb.com

I'm just glad to know that I wasn't the only one to have a crappy Friday.

I don't have the problem of having to get ahold of the person in charge of the routers or the microwave link.... I'm in charge of the whole network..... I've just got to deal with being the whipping boy for bad behaved code that someone in Germany wrote.

(Note - This is not a Lotus Notes issue!!!!) Turns out we are probably the first utility company in the world to roll out SAP's new web based customer interaction center - a piece of their CRM application suite. This wonderful piece of crap ( code) ... is a web application that seems to require a quad core processor and 2GB of RAM to run adequately. I've got a shitpile of IBM pSeries hardware twiddling its thumbs and a blissfully clean network while the CPU utilization on our call center systems is pegging out at 100% for a frickin' browser ap....

Not one damn developer for the piece of crap around to feel the heat... instead the VPs are pissing down our necks about the problem .... like we can poop new processors and RAM out to fix the issue.

SORRY FOR THE RANT!!!! But I feel much better

- chuck -

2. Turtle04/05/2008 02:02:40 AM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

I always thought it was a strange irony that that company's name can be pronounced "sap."

3. ursus04/05/2008 05:29:06 PM

I just changed Internet providers - everything had been working fine for years with the old provider but with the new one I had intermittent internet just as you described - sometimes the network request would just "hang" and I would need to reissue the request and then everything would work just perfectly :o( Anyway, after about 3 weeks I narrowed it down to the MTU size and the technician agreed that the problem could be solved by setting the MTU to 1460 - super only.... You cannot set the MTU in a lot of Apple's products (Apple TV, iPhone and, unfortunately, Airport cards in iMacs) so now I have various cables running through the flat :o( I was also hoping that I would never need to MTU again