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"why not just set all new hardware to an MTU of 9000"

Routers can fragment the packets, switches can't. So that would be pretty chaotic for non-techie installed equipment.



Last time I saw hardware Ethernet switch was 20 years ago. 8-[ ]


There's one in your house probably. It won't frag packets between your wired PC and your wired printer.

There are also certainly a shit load of them in closets and top-of-rack all over where I work.


Plenty of routers today that can't fragment packets. And they have rate limiters where they can only generate a small amount of ICMP 3/4s (maybe 50 a second).




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