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Today is the first time I’ve taken an interstate train trip in something like 15 years. A few things about the trip were pleasantly surprising. Most of these will come as no surprise:
- Less time wasted in security theater at the station prior to departure.
- On-time departure
- More comfortable seats than a plane or bus.
- Quiet.
- Permissive free wifi
Wifi was the biggest surprise. Not that it existed, since we’re living in the future and wifi is expected everywhere. It’s IPv4 only and stuck behind a NAT, which isn’t a big surprise, but it is reasonably open. There isn’t any port filtering of non-web TCP ports, and even non-TCP protocols are allowed out. Even my aiccu IPv6 tunnel worked fine from the train, although I did experience some weird behavior with it.
I haven’t used aiccu much in quite a while, since I have a native IPv6 connection at home, but it can be convenient while traveling. I’m still trying to figure out happened today, though. The first symptoms were that, although I could ping IPv6 hosts, I could not actually log in via IMAP or ssh. Tcpdump showed all the standard symptoms of a PMTU blackhole. Small packets flow fine, large ones are dropped. The interface MTU is set to 1280, which is the minimum MTU for IPv6 and any path on the internet is expected to handle packets of at least that size. Experimentation via ping6 reveals that the largest payload size I can successfully exchange with a peer is 820 bytes. Add 8 bytes for the ICMPv6 header for 828 bytes of payload, plus 40 bytes for the IPv6 header gives an 868 byte packet, which is well under what should be the MTU for this path.
I’ve worked around this problem with an ip6tables rule to rewrite the MSS on outgoing SYN packets to 760 bytes, which should leave 40 for the IPv6 header and 20 for any extension headers:
sudo ip6tables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --set-mss 760
It is working well and will allow me to publish this from the train, which I’d otherwise have been unable to do. But… weird.