Adjusting advertised MTU using hostapd and dnsmasq - networking

I'm turning a raspberry pi into a router and am currently planning on using hostapd for wifi and dnsmasq for dhcp and dns. Inside the router I'm proxying incoming traffic through a wireguard tunnel to a vpn server, but the wireguard interface has an MTU of 1420 whereas when I connect to the router on my laptop my MTU is set to 1500. I'm seeing issues where some requests don't work and others do, and based on some preliminary research my guess is that the MTU mismatch is causing the problem.
My question is, in ipv4 how is the MTU set on connected devices? I've noticed that 1500 seems to be a default but is there a way to advertise a lower MTU to other devices on my network? I've looked into whether it's possible with DHCP via dnsmasq, or with some parameter in hostapd but haven't been able to find an answer about how MTU is set in ipv4. I've seen some threads that suggest that ARP can be used for ipv6 networks, which is a possible backup solution (switching fully to ipv6 for my project), but I would prefer to get ipv4 fully working before making the switch.
I'm still learning a lot about networking so it's also possible my understanding of the situation is wrong. Thanks in advance for any help.

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Sending packets through a virtual interface whose subnet is also same as subnet of another interface

I have a Linux machine with two interfaces eth0 and eth1.
eth0 has 192.168.2.30 and eth1 has 172.16.30.20. eth0 is connected to a router which is the gateway too for the WAN. eth1 is connected to LAN. All is working well until I had to connect a
set of devices with IP rage 192.168.2.5 - 192.168.2.15 to the LAN to which eth1 is also connected.
I want to send a multicast packet to these devices. Since the multicast works on the same subnet, I created an IP alias using following.
system("ifconfig eth1:1 192.168.2.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 up");
Despite adding the above, the packets are not going through eth1. This is found to be because eth0 is also having the same subnet as that of eth1: 1.
I tried calling ip route add <multicast ip> dev eth1. But, no success.
Appreciate if anyone could offer suggestions.
From the looks of it you have at least two problems here and depending on the solution you choose other issues may arise.
Problem one, Overlapping subnets: The absolute 100% correct way to resolve this is to change the subnets so they don't overlap. I can't stress enough how important this is in your situation. If these computer on 192.168.2.5 - 192.168.2.15 are suppose to be connected to the same network as eth0 then you need to reconsider your setup as this would never work because you will create a networking loop or bad routes.
In the first situation where 192.168.2.5 - 192.168.2.15 and 192.168.2.15 aren't physically connected in any way and if someone above you says you can't do this you can try creating a NAT on eth1 so that your system sees the subnet on a different network. But this can make understanding the routes confusing and may interfere with multicast traffic.
After this is done run a tracerroute to ensure traffic is passing correctly. If not please provide the output and the route you expect it to take along with the current setup.
If multicasting doesn't work still then I recommend to create another question for it.

Alternate way of TCP/ IP communication protocal

Alternate way of TCP/ IP communication protocal.
I am using TCP/ IP communication protocol to connect device and communicating with one device to another.
But sometime ping is not reliable especially in firewalls environments.
Let me know the any another way to find out the connection status of the connected devices.
What do you mean with it is not reliable in firewall environments? Do you get a timeout on your ping-request or what? Then something is wrong with your routing on your firewall.
To your question: There's actually just the way over dns () so if there's a DNS in your network you should be able to ping with his net-name. But there's really no difference between this and an IP. You can't ping a MAC-Address (Layer 2).
Now the question, whats the point of this question (Any errors?)

How to enable forwarding for a multicast IP on the private network

I'm trying to get Age of Empires II (AoE2) to work on my LAN. AoE2 is notorious for it's connectivity problems on modern systems, probably because it used a now deprecated network framework called DirectPlay (in DX9) and the code probably wasn't robust back in the day either.
When I host a LAN game on a computer (win7) for AoE2, Wireshark shows my computer sending a couple packets via SSDP protocol to the multicast address 239.255.255.250. This actually goes to my router (for forwarding I assume) and my router returns a packet using ICMP protocol that says "Destination unreachable (Port unreachable)". Because nothing is forwarded to the other computers on the network, they can't see the game that the host has created.
I think I need to get the application/windows7 to send the packet as something like a broadcast, or I need to get the router to broadcast packets going to that multicast address. Does anyone have thoughts or suggestions on how to do this?
My router/gateway is running DD-WRT firmware v24-sp2.
My first guess is you're using wifi, by default most systems disable multicast on wifi because it can have a detrimental effect on the time slicing that wifi uses. however for just a couple machines it shouldn't be an issue.
here's how to disable multicasting but it should point you in the right direction for enabling it: ddwrt multicast
Secondly make sure they are all in the same VLAN a VLAN is defined as a "broadcast domain" meaning machines on separate VLANs will NEVER get broadcast or multicast from other VLANs without some trickery.
Lastly make sure you've enabled multicasting between LAN ports I believe the option is "multicast forward"
Edit: Just a few things to add to the list in case others have this issue. Broadcasting doesn't exist in ipv6, also a machine running ipv6 MAY NOT see broadcasts from a machine on ipv4 and a machine on ipv4 WILL NOT see multicasts to an ipv6 multi-cast address.
Have you tried LogMeIn Hamachi?
Is not a LAN client itself but it creates a fake Online-LAN and gives you a working IP that will allow you to play with who have it.

what's needed to make hostname resolution work on a lan?

I am developing a networked application that runs on a few different computers on a LAN. One of the core needs is for the app to maintain a list of peers on the LAN with which it has communicated in the past, so that it can restore previous sessions. The naive solution would be to just remember the IP and store it in a table, but what happens when the IP of a peer changes?
Instead, I thought I'd store the hostname of the peers so even if the IP changes they will still be reachable via their hostname. (I know hostnames can change as well but that is good enough).
So my question is what exactly is needed to make hostname resolution work on a LAN with mixed Windows/Mac/Linux clients?
Without the use of a central authority the only reliable way to achieve this is through the use of zerconfiguration name resolution. This means that without a multicast router you will only be able to dynamically resolve peers on the same subnet as the resolving host. You could use something like bonjour for mac, netbios or ssdp for windows or avahi for linux but you can't assume that these are enabled. I may be overlooking some more popular protocols that perform this function well but I would personally throw together a quick udp broadcast name resolution protocol for your application. Take a look at these for some more ideas:
Zeroconf Name resolution
Universal local network name resolution method without DNS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking#Name_resolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_address#IP_networking
I would pick a specific udp port to listen on (lets say 12000) and then when you're ready to resolve hosts send a "hello" udp packet out to 255.255.255.255 on port 12000 and all of the other hosts on your network running your app should reply with a packet containing their hostname, possibly other information.

Windows 7 does not accept broadcasts from ip address 0.0.0.1

we have little network devices which are shipped with IP address 0.0.0.1 to ensure that they never collide with any other device in their new environment (thus none of the 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x ranges) until configuration. DHCP is no solution since there might be no DHCP server in the field.
The devices would listen to UDP broadcasts and answer with broadcasts until they are given their new IP address this way.
This worked fine with Windows XP - but sucks with Windows 7: the config program does not receive the answer packets from the devices which still have 0.0.0.1. Wireshark sees the packets, then they are dumped by the system.
Question: Is there any reason (RFC?) that actually prohibits using this address in a local environment? Or is it just MS that was overcautious? Where can I read why they treat this address "invalid"? Which ranges are really "invalid" now, too?
Any idea of a workaround on the PC side (Win 7)?
I know that it is not recommended to use 0.xxx addresses for work places, but for this very reason - having a not-used address - it works perfectly.
Edit: there is a device out there called "Netburner" which might have faced the similar issue, according to their forum. See: http://forum.embeddedethernet.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=612&p=2198 Does - by coincidence - anybody know some background information?
It sounds as if your configuration application is listening for broadcast packets on all network interfaces and expecting to receive packets from foreign subnets.
That should not work - the OS should only pass-on broadcast packets from the subnets each network interface is on, not from all subnets on the same physical (e.g. Ethernet) segment. I am reasonably certain that doing otherwise is broken behaviour WRT the IP protocol.
The are two ways to deal with this:
Make sure that your network interface has an IP address in the target subnet. You can have more than one IP addresses for each network card, so that should not interfere with normal network operations.
Configure or modify you application to use raw sockets, like Wireshark. Keep in mind, however, that this overrides all normal checks and balances and should be avoided, since it can cause behaviour that is almost impossible to diagnose - which is why it is frowned upon by meny network administrators.
Can you you add new routing table entries to Windows machines easily? Windows has to know which interface to use when routing a broadcast packet to the 0.0.0.x network.
The Unix machines I'm familiar with have a routing table that maps network/netmask entries to either gateways or interfaces (if the network is a local network). The local network (192.168.0.0/16 for my home network) gets sent to interface eth0. Everything else 0.0.0.0/0 gets sent to a specific gateway machine 192.168.0.1.
If my machine sent a UDP broadcast message to network 0.0.0.0/24 (in other words, UDP broadcast sent to 0.0.0.255, then my machine would forward the packet to the gateway machine (which it can look up via arp). The switches in the middle wouldn't propagate the packet to other network devices, because the MAC address is set.
If my machine had another routing entry for 0.0.0.0/24 to the local interface, then my machine would send the packet on the wire using an ethernet broadcast group, and the switches would forward the packet to all connections. (Yay! Just like hubs in the 90s! :)
So I figure you need to add a routing entry for 0.0.0.0/24 to your client machines, so that they can properly address the broadcast packet.

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