Re: tcp timestamp issues with google servers

On Thu, 2012-05-17 at 11:39 +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:

Sometimes connection to google.com, gmail.com and other google servers
doesn't work or takes ages to connect.  When this hits it hits all
google servers at the same time and it's persistent.  It never happens
to anything other than google.  Rebooting helps.  Rarely it goes away
spontaneously.

Apparently google is sometimes replying with an invalid TSecr timestamp
value (smaller than the one sent in the last packet) and this confuses
the Linux TCP stack which either discards the packet or sends a Reset.

Network dump attached.

I found only a couple of references to this issue:

http://gotchas.livejournal.com/3028.html

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.networking/browse_thread/thread/29f56feded11b42a

Turning tcp timestamps fixes the issue:

  sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=0

Not sure why this happens only to me and a very few others.

It appears to be an issue with google TCP stack (is it a modified
stack?) but I thought about issues in my network switch (restarting it
doesn't help) or something in the ISP, but those look unlikely.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Miklos



  1   0.000000 192.168.28.100 -> 74.125.232.226 TCP 51303 > http [SYN] Seq=0 Win=14600 Len=0 MSS=1460 SACK_PERM=1 TSV=35355050 TSER=0 WS=5
  2   0.002730 74.125.232.226 -> 192.168.28.100 TCP http > 51303 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=14180 Len=0 MSS=1430 SACK_PERM=1 TSV=1184565067 TSER=35325344 WS=6

Do you really have 2730 usec RTT between you and this (Google ?)
server ?

Are you sure this is not a broken middle box ?