MSS Initiative

NEW (10/17/09): We gave the site a face-lift as well as cleaned up a and added a lot more information.

There are a lot of people on the internet who cannot view a long list of popular websites through no fault of their own. These websites are run be administrators who are unknowingly breaking a core part of TCP/IP that's required for many kinds of connections to work.

If you are here you probably are affected. Are you on a DSL connection that uses PPPoE? Or some other tunnelling protocol? Can't get to your favorite website? That site may be affected by a Path MTU Discovery Blackhole (RFC 2923).

The MSS Initiative is dedicated to educating users and administrators alike. We inform administrators of broken websites and maintaining a blacklist of sites that won't fix their configurations.

Shortly (and I mean days) after I got this idea, I got an email from Richard van den Berg, who, coincidentally, had the same idea. So, we decided to work together in an effort to help eliminate this problem from the Internet.

In accordance with security, open source, and other similar practices no sites will be ostracized unless they refuse to communicate or fix their site. The idea here is that we will notify admins of problem websites and give them at least two weeks to respond. After that time, we will list them here in the 'pending' (read: black) list, along with info on when they were contacted and what, if any, response there was.

You can find our detailed description of the PMTUD Blackhole right here. Additionally, RFC 2923 covers it as well.

A copy of the letter that we send to admins is located here.

If you would like to report a broken site, we would greatly appreciate you testing it using our testing instructions first. We may provide a script for this at some point, but the instructions should suffice. When you're sure it's broken, email it to mss@ipom.com.

SITES BROKEN: 19
SITES FIXED: 23

Name	URL	Date Contacted	Correspondence / Comments
Walmart	http://www.walmart.com	July 08, 2007	None.
RoadrunnerRecords	http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com	July 08, 2007	None. It's worth noting that this site will eventually fall back to about 500-byte packets and work, but only after significant delays and obviously 500-byte packets provides significant performance issues.
Novell	http://www.novell.com	July 08, 2007	08/03/07 - Camille Hill from marketing said she'd forward the message onto the appropriate department.
Match	http://www.match.com	July 08, 2007	None
Gateway	http://www.gateway.com	July 08, 2007	None
About.com	http://www.about.com	July 08, 2007	None
Overture	http://perf.overture.com	April 14, 2007	None
CNET	http://www.cnet.com	April 14, 2007	Out of office reply from Noel Cragg, but no further response.
Cisco	http://www.cisco.com	April 14, 2007	None - hostmaster@ doesn't seem to be a valid email address and they provide no alternative address on their site.
Microsoft	http://www.microsoft.com http://www.hotmail.com	April 14, 2007	None - hostmaster@ doesn't seem to be a valid email address and they provide no alternative address on their site.
Ebay	http://promo.ebay.com	January 25, 2003	None 04/14/07 - Noticed that search.ebay.com and cgi.ebay.com were fixed but they link to promo.ebay.com which is still broken.
Verisign	http://www.verisign.com/	February 9, 2002	02/11/02 - Human reply saying they forward the email to the correct department 02/20/02 - Email giving ticket number and saying to call if we have any further problems 03/18/02 - Richard called them. The support person said she would pass on the message to the appropriate department. 11/29/03 - We noticed they were fixed 07/08/07 - We received a report they were broken again!
Security Focus	http://www.securityfocus.com/	February 4, 2002	None. 04/17/02 - We noticed they were fixed 10/19/02 - We then noticed they were broken again! 11/29/03 - We noticed they were fixed - again 07/08/07 - We received a report they were broken again!
Discreet	http://www.discreet.com/	February 24, 2002	Automated 04/14/07 - verified still broken
mp3.com	http://ww.mp3.com/	February 23, 2002	Automated 04/14/07 - hardware/software.mp3.com no longer exist, but mp3.com is still broken
Windows and .NET Magazine	http://www.winntmag.com/	February 9, 2002	Automated 04/14/07 - verified still broken
Sears	http://www.sears.com/	February 9, 2002	Automated 04/14/07 - verified still broken
Id Software	http://www.idsoftware.com/	February 9, 2002	None 04/14/07 - verified still broken
Iomega	http://www.iomega.com/	February 9, 2002	None 04/14/07 - verified still broken