ECN
Tom
Eastep
2001
2002
2003
Thomas M. Eastep
2003-03-28
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is described in RFC 3168 and
is a proposed internet standard. Unfortunately, not all sites support ECN
and when a TCP connection offering ECN is sent to sites that don't
support it, the result is often that the connection request is ignored.
To allow ECN to be used, Shorewall allows you to enable ECN on your
Linux systems then disable it in your firewall when the destination
matches a list that you create (the /etc/shorewall/ecn file).
You enable ECN by
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn
You must arrange for that command to be executed at system boot.
Most distributions have a method for doing that -- on RedHat, you make an
entry in /etc/sysctl.conf.
net.ipv4.tcp_ecn = 1
Entries in /etc/shorewall/ecn have two columns as follows:
INTERFACE
The name of an interface on your system
HOST(S)
An address (host or subnet) of a system or group of systems
accessed through the interface in the first column. You may include
a comma-separated list of such addresses in this column.
Your external interface is eth0 and you want to disable ECN for
tcp connections to 192.0.2.0/24:
/etc/shorewall/ecnINTERFACEHOST(S)
eth0192.0.2.0/24