Networking change causes distribution headaches [LWN.net]

Networking change causes distribution headaches

Posted Oct 30, 2008 6:27 UTC (Thu) by davem (subscriber, #4154)
In reply to: Networking change causes distribution headaches by njs
Parent article: Networking change causes distribution headaches

Feel free to ignore the security implications of this change
as I detailed in an earlier comment.

I just mentioned the data corrupter just to show how absolutely
insane this was on just about every level.

Want to know the litmus test of how stupid this is? Not one
damn ubuntu kernel developer asked any of the core networking
folks for guidance on how to handle this problem. They didn't
know the implications, and they didn't bother to ask people
who did.

That's the definition of failure.

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Networking change causes distribution headaches

Posted Oct 30, 2008 16:08 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Well, you would have to be doing a distribution upgrade, boot into it immediately and go into production without looking for updates. I think it is fair to assume that not too many people would run into TCP timestamp related corruption. If they really care about their data, obviously their scripts would notice the absence of TCP timestamping with this new release.

Here's a simple explanation for Ubuntu's decision.

As a side note: for home users -- who are extremely unlikely to be running at high enough data rates -- there is (also) the option to revert to the last working kernel. Maybe in a next release, this specific kind of distribution problem will actually be "solved" by Ubuntu. Which would be very nice.

Second side note: a couple of years ago PAWS users were vulnerable -- on a rather big scale -- to a remote Dos. Your mileage will always vary.