Re: problems with tiscali broadband

In message <m1abxoh27a.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Robert Marshall <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
A friend is having problems with tiscali that their helpdesk has - so
far - been unable to resolve - he is unable to browse to certain
websites - but most sites are fine - if a bit slowish.

www.bt.com (for example) just never loads - it appears to ignore the
request - with not even a 'loading..' (or whatever) in firefox - but
accesses to google are fine. He doesn't have a proxy set in the
browser - do tiscali use transparent proxies?
[...]
so the http request did get to my machine it is just that the data never got back

50% of web accesses appear ok it is just some that some appear to hang/don't display the page

Could it be a faulty broadband modem, other things to try, thoughts?

It could be caused many different things. I found, however, that certain MTU settings on a router can cause the symptoms you describe.

Specifically, a router I had (Vigor 2600We) would accept a command line input to set the MTU to 1500 bytes without complaint. In fact what happened is that the outbound MTU was set to 1500 bytes but the inbound MRU was limited to 1492 bytes, and PathMTUDiscovery appears to have been blocked or disabled. The immediate outcome was difficulty in loading some, and delay in viewing, web sites.

If your friend is suffering from the same issue, ask him to try setting the router MTU to 1492 bytes, or perhaps even less to one of the many different optimisation settings I've seen recommended around here (1430, 1458, 1472 and 1478 have all been recommended at different times).
--
Dave N

N.B. Mail to nospam is rejected. Reply-To does work.
.

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