Eclipse ADSL and MTU size

I use Eclipse Internet for my ADSL broadband connection. It’s only been switched on for a few days (since last Wednesday, in fact). It seems to be going well so far – better than my old provider at least (it’s quite a bit faster). The only problem was, sometimes web pages didn’t load up completely – if it had a lot of images, half the page would load and then just stall.

I also noticed a problem yesterday – I was trying to upload the latest Fordham sermon via FTP, and it wouldn’t work. It just stalled, and then the connection timed out. I then tried to upload something smaller, and that wouldn’t upload either!

I checked on the Eclipse knowledge base, and it brought up some information on the MTU Size. MTU means ‘Maximum Transmission Unit’, i.e. the maximum packet size in bytes that can be transmitted across a connection. Anyway, Eclipse recommend that you set this to 1458 (well, that’s what I set mine to – your mileage may vary. See the Eclipse knowledge base article for more info).

On Linux, specifically Ubuntu, you can change the MTU for a network interface by typing:

sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1458

Once I’d run this command, I checked again some of the websites which weren’t loading properly and it had fixed the problem. I was also able to upload files!

In order to make the change permanent, have a look at this article.

Hopefully this will help a few other people who migrate to Eclipse!


Comments

One response to “Eclipse ADSL and MTU size”

  1. […] The symptoms seem mainly to be problems uploading – sending large emails, uploading stuff via FTP… I’ve even had problems with Facebook and logging into Gmail! It’s all very similar to the last time. […]

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