Jeff Weisberg on Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:01:07 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] ssh is a really beautiful tool...


| i've had a lame attempt to start to construct a poor man's vpn
| using ssh but on further reading some people find the performance
| really poor, on account of tunnelling tcp over ssh over tcp
| (some race conditions, apparently).  What i think they do
| is run pppd on both sides of ssh and route the new IP's 
| to that.  I think.  If you can successfuly pull this off
| can you post back i'll be interested to know how, thanks!


the problem is that TCP was designed to run over an un-reliable
datagram service, detect lost packets, and retransmit as needed.

when running TCP over TCP, the retransmission algorithms of the
2 TCPs "fight" each other. once a packet is dropped, the outer
TCP times out and retransmits, a short time thereafter, the inner
TCP will timeout and retransmit (needlessly). because of the way
the timers adjust themselves, TCP can easily choke on retransmissions
and stall the flow.


	--jeff

see also:
	http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html
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