Uverse Motorola Arris NVG589 modem/router. Unfamiliar setting. Whatsit dooo... ?

[Brad Johnson]

Tracking down a Youtube app buffering issue on XBox one. It began when AT&T "upgraded" my modem/router to a Motorola Arris NVG589. While perusing the router software's innards I came across a setting of "Drop packets with unknown ether types". It's enabled by default and I don't want to mess with it until I'm familiar with it's function and any potential disablement issues.

Need input!

Brad

[Jocassee]

Tracking down a Youtube app buffering issue on XBox one. It began when AT&T "upgraded" my modem/router to a Motorola Arris NVG589. While perusing the router software's innards I came across a setting of "Drop packets with unknown ether types". It's enabled by default and I don't want to mess with it until I'm familiar with it's function and any potential disablement issues.

Need input!

Brad
[/quote

Pretty sure thats to filter out data that's not supposed to be there.

[Firethorn]

It's not very well named, but basically it means that it drops 'weird' packets that don't conform to normal IP rules.  IE it's not TCP, UDP, or a few other acronyms for standard packets.

Anything that successfully reached your router from the 'web' should be standard packets.  Youtube videos, for example, use UDP packets if I remember right.  They might of switched to TCP.

Some attacks use non-standard packets to do weird things, so dropping them is a good thing.

[AJ Dual]

If you're using something with a weird packet-type, you probably already know it, and you're also probably only routing it internally for some special reason,  because there's few places on the external Internet that are going to be really happy about passing them along.

Also, it's probably not going to do much anyway, because a packet with any ether-type, weird/malformed, or proper is really more of a layer2 Data-Link protocol, rather than a layer3 protocol like TCP/IP.

Or is my cold medication getting to me?