Linux gateway/router + unable to access certain (HTTPS) sites

I’ve had an issue for a while, being unable to access certain websites such as https://fon.com, but also certain parts of the Apple, Fortis and Microsoft site, while other (https) websites worked fine.

Running Wireshark I found that only about 5ish packets got transferred, and all other data to that website abruptly stopped.

I’m using ADSL (EDPnet), which has an MTU of 1492, however, I was able to access all websites from the router (using lynx, for example), but not from any other PC within the network.

# ifconfig ppp0
ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:85.234.196.57  P-t-P:85.234.196.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1492 Metric:1
RX packets:38804442 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:28930886 errors:0 dropped:5020 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
RX bytes:45941523311 (42.7 GiB)  TX bytes:2887926670 (2.6 GiB)

As it had worked before without any issues, I was more thinking about a kernel problem (or a module of it), however, stripping down unnecessary modules and updating my kernel a few times didn’t resolve the issue. I even booted an old kernel I had still lying around from when I could access the websites. However, all these attempts were in vain.

Thinking it might have been a firewall issue, I flushed all my iptables rules, and started over from scratch. However, this too didn’t solve my issue.

When I VPN’ed or used my Macbook Pro directly as PPPoE device (by-passing the Gentoo router) I was able to access all the websites as well.

After being close to giving up, I found the following iptables rule:

iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu -t mangle

And try again.

This did solve my issue. 🙂

This is because the default 100mbit MTU is 1500, instead of 1492 for PPPoE.

http://www.edpnet.be/

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Comments

One response to “Linux gateway/router + unable to access certain (HTTPS) sites”

  1. Fred Keet avatar

    Thank you.

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