Category: ADSL

Numerous residential access technologies face path MTU discovery issues. PPPoE connections (with MTU = 1492 bytes instead of 1500 bytes) is the best-known example, and we’ll see more of them as various tunneling-based IPv4-to-IPv6 transition mechanisms (6rd, DS-Lite, MAP-E) become more popular.

Obviously you could use the same old MSS clamping tricks in the brave new IPv6 world or decide (like DS-Lite) to deal with IP fragmentation in underlay access networks ... but there’s another option in the IPv6 world: reduce client-side MTU with router advertisement messages.

The murky details of IPv6 implementations never crop up till you start deploying it (or, as Randy Bush recently wrote: “it is cheering to see that the ipv6 ivory tower still stands despite years of attack by reality”).

Here’s another one: in theory the prefixes delegated through DHCPv6 should be static and permanently assigned to the customers for long periods of time.

Somehow I got involved in an IPv6 RADIUS accounting discussion. This is what I found to work in Cisco IOS release 15.2(4)S:

A while ago John McManus wrote a great DSCP QoS Over MPLS Thoughts article at Etherealmind blog explaining how 6-bit IP DSCP value gets mapped into 3-bit MPLS EXP bits (now renamed to Traffic Class field). The most important lesson from his post should be “there is no direct DSCP-to-EXP mapping and you have to coordinate your ideas with the SP”. Let’s dig deeper into the SP architecture to truly understand the complexities of this topic.

We’ll start with a reference diagram: user traffic is flowing from Site-A to Site-B and the Service Provider is offering MPLS/VPN service between PE-A and PE-B. Traffic from multiple customer sites (including Site-A) is concentrated at SW-A and passed in individual VLANs to PE-A.

Based on the ADSL reference model, let’s try to figure out how you can influence the quality of service over your ADSL link (for example, you’d like to prioritize VoIP packets over web download). To understand the QoS issues, we need to analyze the congestion points; these are the points where a queue might form when the network is overloaded and where you can reorder the packets to give some applications a preferential treatment.

Remember: QoS is always a zero-sum game. If you prioritize some applications, you’re automatically penalizing all others.

I’m getting lots of ADSL QoS questions lately¹, so it’s obviously time to cover this topic. Before going into the QoS details, I want to make sure my understanding of the implications of the baroque ADSL protocol stack is correct.

In the most complex case, a DSL service could have up to eight separate components (including the end-user’s workstation):

Recently I had to implement Internet access using ADSL as the primary link and ISDN as the backup link. Obviously the most versatile solution would use the techniques described in my Small Site Multi-homing articles, but the peculiarities of Cisco IOS implementation of the ADSL technology resulted in a much simpler solution.

IOS implementation of PPPoE links uses dialer interfaces. However, the “dialing” on these interfaces is activated as soon as the underlying PPPoE session is active (before the first interesting packet is routed to the interface). When the simulated dial-out occurs, the router starts PPP negotiations including the IPCP handshake, which usually results in an IP address assigned to the dialer interface. Net result: if the dialer interface has an IP address, the PPPoE session is obviously active (and vice versa).

In my home office, I'm using DSL access to the Internet with ISDN backup to another ISP, as shown on the next figure:

Obviously, I would like the ISDN backup to kick in whenever the primary connection goes down; two static default routes and reliable static routing on the primary default seem like a perfect solution.