mss on linux 2.2.19

[Kalpesh Shah]

I wish to be CC'ed on the answers/comments to my response.

I am doing research in TCP-congestion control for one of my classes. I
have been running a client server http experiment on my network.
I tried running the server code  on my private research  network and
client code on one of the local networks.
  In order to trace the traffic i had let TCPdump run on the server port.
After collecting the results i got some unexpected results.
  The MSS(maximum segment size)  on the local network machine(client) was
just 4  and the MSS for my machine was just 8.
  Both these machines are running Debian Linux (kernel version 2.2.19). I
tried looking for the deafult MSS value in the /proc area but it wasnt
there.
  I checked for it in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/route but it was not there..

  Could anyone tell  me if there is any other way to locate  a systems
MSS and change it ?

And also what is the general default MSS on Debian Linux ?

kalpesh