Jumbo Frames - over cross-over cable, and over GigE switch

It is complete news to me that the use of jumbo frames (or other frame size contraints) would be in any way negotiated between communicating Ethernet stations, with or without using a switch.

Yes.

best regards Patrick

I was kind of surprised to hear that myself :)...

Thanks. That might partially explain something that I'm puzzling over. I had set Jumbo Frames in the (Intel) NICs to 9014 bytes, and tried some "ping -f" tests, and am getting a "fragmented" message for anything with "-l" greater than 1472 bytes.

I've been searching through the documentation for the switch (a GigE switch that's been re-branded by IBM), but I can't find anywhere to enable/disable Jumbo Frames.

Assuming that there IS somewhere in the GigE switch configuration to enable/disable Jumbo Frames, would the Jumbo Frames being disabled in the switch cause the "ping -f" test to behave this way?

Jim

(snip)

You set the NIC to 9014, but what is the MTU that IP is using on the interface? Fragmentation is normally an IP function.

As far as I know, only a layer three switch would do IP fragmentation. Though there are stories about ethernet/FDDI bridging doing it, also. (FDDI allows frames larger than 1500, I believe somewhere around 4096.)

Where are the messages coming out?

-- glen

On both machines:

ifconfig eth0 mtu 9014

No. Packets would appear to be sent from the local machine, but mysteriously disappear in the switch. Some counter you'll find in about five weeks while studying documentation, will have increased by one.

best regards Patrick

glen and Patrick,

I'm going to respond to both of your posts in this one post. Hope that that's ok.

Sorry that I forgot to mention that both machines are running Windows

Patrick, your comment above about the packets appearing to mysteriously disappear might explain something else that I found when I did more testing yesterday.

When I did "ping -f" from machine 1 to machine 2, I got timeouts. When I did "ping -f" from machine 2 to machine 1, I got the fragmentation msg.

Now, with your post, I'm wondering if MTU is set larger than 1500 on one machine and not the other?

glen and Patrick, re. MTU, does that mean that I should have set the MTU? In my case, with Windows 2003, I think that there is an "MTU" item that I can set in the Registry, but in Windows, I think it's under the individual "Interfaces" or "Adapters".

I'll try that, but in any event, since I'm getting the timeouts when doing the "ping -f" from machine 2 to machine 1, does that seem to indicate that the GigE switch is NOT passing the Jumbo Frames?

Maybe I should go back and test with the cross-over cable again, but this time manually set the MTU? I had given up on that earlier because of the comment that I was told that the NICs might not negotiate the Jumbo Frames when going over a cross-over.

Jim

In which case it should be called a router :)

More like nightmares - because the device wanted to be "just a little bit IP/pregnant" and didn't support all the things it must for an IP router. Should all be in the netnews archives from the mid '90's and earlier.

rick jones