Re: 2.6.17: networking bug??

[Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Further to this, the current behaviour is badly unpredictable.
> 
> A machine could be working perfectly, not (noticeably) affected
> by this bug.  And then the user adds another stick of RAM to it.

This "bug" already existed in 2.6.16 to a certain extent: you were 
losing out on a lot of TCP performance. Go back to 2.6.7, measure TCP 
performance, and you'll probably find it was significantly better.

Also, there aren't that many broken end-points out there. 
www.everymac.com loads fine for me and does not ignore the window scale 
factor.

The problem in your case is a broken router in the middle. I had the 
same problem: certain sites would not load, but there is absolutely 
nothing wrong with the servers that run these sites:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=114478312100641&w=2

I contacted my ISP and informed them of the issue. They fixed it 
nationwide within a few weeks. You might try confirming that your 
problem only applies to HTTP like mine did (ISP runs some lame 
transparent webcaches), and it was a bug in the software there (NetApp).

We already had the "some routers are broken, should we do anything" 
discussion back at the time of 2.6.8:

http://lwn.net/Articles/92727/

Daniel