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> From: Bo Berglund > PMTU is something I don't even have a clue as to what it is.... Path maximum transmission unit. Different links along the route from sender to recipient can set different MTUs - many old modem lins on PPP used to have about a 600-byte MTU, for example. Even if you were on Ethernet at both ends with a 1500 byte MTU, if you sent a packet via a modem between two offices and it was over 600 bytes it would get fragmented (or dropped if it had its don't-fragment bit set). > What can I do next (the Wireshark suggestion is tried but I don't > really understand what to do with it)? If we're narrowing this down to the network stack, as it seems... 1) Check VMware Infrastructure for known bugs in its network stack. A long shot. 2) As I said before, talk to your network+firewall person/people (I don't know who manages that on your network). 3) Run Wireshark on the server and client *at the same time*. Capture all traffic going to/from the other machine's IP address (i.e. on the server, capture all traffic to/from the client). Start both captures, run the command that fails, stop and review both captures. You're looking for differences between them - on a reliable network, you should see exactly the same packets at both ends. A certain number of TCP retransmissions may happen if the network's busy, but it shouldn't be enough to kill the connection (you'll see the transmission of an identical packet some time after the original was transmitted but not received). If you see any differences between the two traces, your problem is almost certainly somewhere on the network. 4) If you can find out enough detail, tell us about the network infrastructure between the virtual server and the two workstations on which you're testing, and the firewalling on each workstation and the server. 5) Hire Saint Dogbert to shout "Out! you demons of stupidity!" at client and server and see if it makes any difference, as by this time most rational forms of investigation have failed ;-). - Peter