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    Risks To Enabling MSS Clamping on IPSec?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved IPsec
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    • planedropP
      planedrop
      last edited by

      Apologies if this is straightforward but I wanted to get some more details before making any changes and MSS Clamping is an area I'm not 100% confident in.

      So, I don't have Maximum MSS enabled on my IPSec settings for a VPN that moves quite a lot of large frame traffic. I did some pcaps and I am seeing fragmentation on the WAN side, though performance is still fine so I may not even go down the "rabbit hole" of "fixing" this as I'm still seeing 100s of megabits per second of throughput.

      Anyway, the packets are a bit too large to fit in a standard MTU length, so I was thinking maybe I'd see even more performance if I went ahead and set the Maximum MSS to be 1400 for IPSec.

      Are there risks to enabling this? This setup has a lot of existing VPNs that I would hate to break even if only temporarily.

      Additionally, I don't think I'm totally understanding the below:

      • How does MSS Clamping really work in this situation? Do the clients on one end need to adjust their packet size or? I guess I'm just not sure how a router can set MSS clamping and not break everything internally.
      • What about PMTUD? Isn't this supposed to handle fragmentation detection and MTU adjustments? Both ends of this VPN are pfSense
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