From: John Beckett 

Mike N.  wrote in message
news::
> With news.barkto.com ping turned back on, I tried to measure the MTU. Using
> the command
>
>    ping -f -l xxxx news.barkto.com
> (That's lower case L, not capital i)   , varying the payload length, I get
> a maximum ping payload of 1472 bytes - and the maximum packet size with
> headers of 1514 bytes.   That's also the maximum size I can send on my LAN.

Yes - 1472 is what you would expect on Ethernet:
  Ethernet frame data[1500] = IP[20] + ICMP[8] + PingData[1472]

I was expecting you to be using something like PPPoE, in which case your
ping above should fail because of the extra PPPoE header. I imagined that
might be the cause of your slow connection (I imagine Geo's server has no
strange tunneling headers).

I won't get a chance to look at your emailed capture until tomorrow night
(a quick look suggests it is deeply in silly window syndrome ... weird).
Thanks for sending.

John

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