It probably has to do with being native ipv6 and needing to ride a 6to4 nat to reach the broader internet.
Start at 1400 and walk the MTU down by ~50 until you find stability, then id creep it back up by 10 to find the ‘perfect’ size, but that part isn’t really needed if you’re impatient. :)
E. I found 1290 was needed for reliable VPN over an ATT nighthawk hotspot.
That makes sense! Believe it or not it’s actually easier for an ISP to block a whole country than select websites and services. We actually null route all Russian public IP space where I work, that would absolutely be plausible on a national scale as well.
It’s imperfect, you can get around it, but it catches 99% of normal users, which is the goal.
You are absolutely correct, I should have lead with that. Encrypted client handshake means no one can see what certificate you are trying to request from the remote end of your connection, even your ISP.
However, It’s worth noting though that if I am your ISP and I see you connecting to say public IP 8.8.8.8 over https (443) I don’t need to see the SNI flag to know you’re accessing something at Google.
First, I have a list of IP addresses of known blocked sites, I will just drop any traffic destined to that address, no other magic needed.
Second, if you target an IP that isn’t blocked outright, and I can’t see your SNI flag, I can still try to reverse lookup the IP myself and perform a block on your connection if the returned record matches a restricted pattern, say google.com.
VPN gets around all of these problems, provided you egress somewhere less restrictive.
Hope that helps clarify.
Yeah, even if they miss your DNS request, the ISP can still do a reverse lookup on the destination IP you’re attempting to connect to and just drop the traffic silently. That is pretty rare though, at least in US, mainly because It costs money to enforce restrictions like that at scale, which means blocking things isn’t profitable. However, slurping up your DNS requests can allow them to feed you false error pages, littered with profitable ads, all under the guies of enforcing copyright protections.
Most ISP blocking is pretty superficial, usually just at the DNS level, you should be fine in the vast majority of cases. While parsing for the SNI flag on the client hello is technically possible, it’s computationally expensive at scale, and generally avoided outside of enterprise networks.
With that siad, When in doubt, VPN out. ;)
A lot of negativity around Ubiquity in here, which is surprising to me, honestly. I had their USG for years and loved it, recently swapped it out for the Dream Machine and love it. Really don’t understand the complaints about linking it to the cloud. I just didn’t bother, everything works fine. Additionally, I managed to get a Debian container running on it and installed ntopng, it’s been awesome for getting realtime visibility into my network traffic.
E. I should add I have 6 of their switches and 3 access points, one of which is at least 7 years old and still receiving updates.