Re: Fun and surprises with IPv6 fragmentation

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 3/2/2018 9:23 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
> On 3/2/2018 9:09 PM, Ryan Hamilton wrote:
>> I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but I understood that in IPv6
>> routers could not fragment IPv6 packets, only endpoints.
>>
>>     Unlike in IPv4, IPv6 routers never fragment IPv6 packets. Packets
>>     exceeding the size of the maximum transmission unit of the
>>     destination link are dropped and this condition is signaled by a
>>     Packet too Big ICMPv6 type 2 message to the originating node,
>>     similarly to the IPv4 method when the Don't Fragment bit is set.[1]
>>
>>     End nodes in IPv6 are expected to perform path MTU discovery to
>>     determine the maximum size of packets to send, and the
>>     upper-layer protocol is expected to limit the payload size.
>>     However, if the upper-layer protocol is unable to do so, the
>>     sending host may use the Fragment extension header in order to
>>     perform end-to-end fragmentation of IPv6 packets.  
>>
>>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_packet#Fragmentation
>>
>>
>> How sure are you that it's a router and not the sending host that's
>> doing the fragmentation.
>
> Yes, you would think that. And you would be right in theory. But then,
> in theory, theory and practice are the same...

And to answer the "how do you know" question, here is what the server
says about itself:

ubuntu@ip-172-31-61-32:~$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 12:40:99:30:a3:86
          inet addr:172.31.61.32  Bcast:172.31.63.255  Mask:255.255.240.0
          inet6 addr: 2600:1f18:2310:d230:5103:7d9e:7d75:374f/128
Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: fe80::1040:99ff:fe30:a386/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:9001  Metric:1
          RX packets:32757 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:15697 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:8025531 (8.0 MB)  TX bytes:3622487 (3.6 MB)

Note the "MTU:9001". I don't think that a 1518 bytes packet would be
fragmented by that particular end point. Something else did it.

-- Christian Huitema