ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

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murphy
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by murphy » Sat May 30, 2009 3:13 am

The ooma hub provides none of the controls that even the cheapest routers have. They chose to enable the ping response and there is no way to turn it off. The hub works fine connected to your router the same way you would connect a PC.
Customer since January 2009
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niknak
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by niknak » Sat May 30, 2009 7:49 am

I'm not sure if there is a way to disable ICMP (PING) inside the OOMA hub
Most routers have this ability...if your hub was connected behind your router you could disable ICMP and try shields up again - it should work

zeitwatch1
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by zeitwatch1 » Sat May 30, 2009 11:09 am

Niknak, I am thoroughly impressed with your simple solution and equally disgusted by my level of stupidity. DUH! Why COULDN'T I have connected the hub to the router instead of the other way around?? Dummy here just read ooma's instructions and followed them to the letter. I switched them, as you suggested, and passed Shields Up with flying colors. Thank you, thank you, thank you!! I've been surfing unprotected, pingable, for four months; God knows the damage I've done or the bullets I've dodged.

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scottlindner
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by scottlindner » Sat May 30, 2009 12:00 pm

zeitwatch1 wrote:Niknak, I am thoroughly impressed with your simple solution and equally disgusted by my level of stupidity. DUH! Why COULDN'T I have connected the hub to the router instead of the other way around?? Dummy here just read ooma's instructions and followed them to the letter. I switched them, as you suggested, and passed Shields Up with flying colors. Thank you, thank you, thank you!! I've been surfing unprotected, pingable, for four months; God knows the damage I've done or the bullets I've dodged.
That's doesn't make you a dummy. You now went from Ooma's "Basic Configuration" to an "Advanced Network Configuration". You now own the problem of maintaining QoS for Ooma where before the Ooma took care of the quality of service for you.

I mention this because I also am using what Ooma calls an Advanced Network Configuration and today I am setting up a new router to put in place that has good QoS capabilities. I haven't done it yet (I'm waiting for permission from the wife to dink with our Internet access) but I will certainly post my results when I do.

As a good example of why this is important. A couple of days ago I was talking to someone and was doing work using one of our applications from home. Whenever I was using the application the voice broke up. Once I get my new router in place and configure the QoS I should be able to talk to someone and use this hard hitting application at the same time without problems.

Cheers,
Scott

niknak
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by niknak » Sat May 30, 2009 9:06 pm

.. DUH! Why COULDN'T I have connected the hub to the router instead of the other way around?? Dummy here just read ooma's instructions and followed them to the letter..


Nothing wrong with following directions...it's always the best course unless you have problems. Don't worry, many folks here including myself use the advanced network setup with OOMA hub sitting behind our routers!

.. I've been surfing unprotected, pingable, for four months; God knows the damage I've done or the bullets I've dodged.
Not to worry, just because your pc returns a PING request, it does not mean that your router will pass other traffic, all routers act as hardware firewalls...also your router probably gives out DHCP addresses so any ping to those addresses must first get past the IP address assigned to your router by your ISP

I'm glad things worked out for you!

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scottlindner
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by scottlindner » Sun May 31, 2009 6:40 am

[quote="Bobby B"]Hi ggilman,

The Hub auto-adjusts the MTU to 1492 if you're using PPPoE on the Hub. If you're using PPPoE and the data is larger than 1500 bytes, then the Hub will correctly fragment the data.

Normally, path MTU discovery on the end-clients should take care of any MTU mismatches you have upstream of the computers (if Path MTU discovery is working, it'll just take the lowest MTU on the path).

-Bobby

[quote="ggilman"]

I have a similar problem that maybe you can help me with. I am a DSL user therefore my MTU is 1492. I am using an Advanced Network Configuration so I am not using PPPoE on the Ooma Hub. The Ooma Hub is defaulting to 1500 which you know is clobbering the performance the Ooma could be having. Is there a way to tell it to discovery the correct MTU setting, or to hard code it manually? I prefer the auto since that's easier to maintain should my MTU ever change again in the future. Simply chopping up frames to fit whatever MTU is the situation we all should be trying to avoid.

Scott

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ggilman
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by ggilman » Sun May 31, 2009 5:37 pm

Scott, I'm still not clear either. What it appears to me is "automatic" simply chooses between DHCP & PPPoE settings. If you are behind a router, as with both of us it will always go with the DHCP. With DHCP it then always uses 1500 for MTU. I don't believe it is doing an "automatic" MTU setting, just automatically changing between DHCP & PPPoE. Once that decision is made, it fixes the MTU based solely on that decision.

If there is an automatic MTU adjustment being made, it is in the MTU Path Discovery that Bobby mentions. And if so, it does not show up as adjusted in my setup, it shows 1500 rather than 1492. MTU path sounds like it should work just fine for optimization, but does the ooma do this and just not report any difference? Also, if MTU path works well, why do you see documents all over the the Internet on how to change the MTU on your PC? Shouldn't they just do it automatically too?

Anyway, as I have it set up currently with a 1500 MTU, it may be perfectly optimal already with MTU Path discovery but I'm not certain, and I'd personally feel more comfortable if I could just set an MTU number in manually.

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scottlindner
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by scottlindner » Mon Jun 01, 2009 3:22 am

ggilman wrote:Scott, I'm still not clear either. What it appears to me is "automatic" simply chooses between DHCP & PPPoE settings. If you are behind a router, as with both of us it will always go with the DHCP. With DHCP it then always uses 1500 for MTU. I don't believe it is doing an "automatic" MTU setting, just automatically changing between DHCP & PPPoE. Once that decision is made, it fixes the MTU based solely on that decision.
I'm using a static IP address and do not have the ability to set the MTU, and it is set at 1500 rather than 1492. Which means it's using almost twice the bandwidth as compared to other users. This could explain why I sometimes have QoS problems while doing something on the Internet. It's already nearly saturating my upsteam.

Scott

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ggilman
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by ggilman » Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:44 am

scottlindner wrote: I'm using a static IP address and do not have the ability to set the MTU, and it is set at 1500 rather than 1492. Which means it's using almost twice the bandwidth as compared to other users. This could explain why I sometimes have QoS problems while doing something on the Internet. It's already nearly saturating my upsteam.
Scott
A couple of times I have had upload speed issues when I was well aware of what traffic should have been on my network and should not have had problems with the amount of bandwidth ooma is reported to take. This is one of the reasons I started investigating the MTU.

I've been trying to figure out how to test if MTU path is happening automatically & just not reporting any difference in the interface. The only way I know to measure this is to have a packet-sniffer on the outside of my router. With a packet-sniffer, I should be able to analyze the packet sizes from the ooma to see if fragmentation is occurring. I haven't taken the time to set up my network to perform such tests yet but if I do, I'll report back.

With respect to your QoS issue, are you certain you have QoS set up properly on your router? I had issues from time to time and had to keep reducing my upload speed on my router until my ooma performed decently but it seems ok now. I'm just interested in the MTU because it's possible I'm transmitting more data than necessary, but the ooma still performs decently within my QoS cap. Assuming ooma doesn't take up over 100% of your bandwidth, you should be able to adjust your settings to have decent performance from your ooma, at the cost of your other uploads of course.

WayneDsr
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Re: ooma and MTU settings -- Internet speed

Post by WayneDsr » Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:14 am

For what it's worth:
I've measured ooma on both upload and download bandwidth with Tomato firmware. On a single call the upload and download bandwidth is never more than 50k.
Hardly a bandwitdh hog.

Below:
After the first little peaks there is a short plateau, this is call one. Call one hangs up (short call) and call 2 comes in for the balance of the graph.
Notice upload (red) and download (blue) are about equal.
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