Stefan Bader wrote:
> this is bad new, sorry. The problem here is, that as much as you are unfamiliar with kernels and packaging,

Don't worry, I think it is quite good news - although (of course) it 
could have been better!

You seem to be convinced that I am running your new kernel, so at least 
I understand how to get one made by you into my system without breaking it.

> I am not very much into the depths of protocols. But maybe we can help each other out here.

I am certainly prepared to help as much as possible. This bug is 
inconvenient for me, but I have a work-round. It is a nasty bug that 
crept in with the Gutsy kernel, but luckily I skipped releases and went 
straight from dapper and feisty to Hardy.

I suspect there are a lot of people out there who are already suffering 
with hung network printers, or will be when they upgrade to the Hardy 
release. Because it is LTS, someone HAS to fix it soon.

> I am quite confident that I got the patches that were mentioned as fixes to this got into the PPA kernel.
> The changelog you see when expanding the entry of the kernel on the PPA page get generated automatically
> as I prepare the kernels.

Thanks for the tip... I found the changelog installed by your package 
and can see you used three fixes all labelled "LP: #213081". I'm 
convinced (at last) that I have installed your kernel properly. (It is 
easy to think you've done something right when you haven't.)

> Beside of other fixes there are three that are concerned with F-RTO. One I added because one of the other two
> depended on it and the description sounded like an isolated fix as well.
> Since you can print with the Intrepid kernel, there will be not much sense in opening an bugzilla bug.

Don't be too hasty. I need to go back to my intrepid system and run some 
network traces. I wasn't happy with the speed of printing, even though 
it "worked". I think I need to be certain that the fix developed by 
Ilpo Järvinen is 100% correct before we put too much energy into Hardy.

> The usual answer is, use the latest kernel.

I can follow that argument for feisty and gutsy, but it doesn't sound 
right for Hardy. I think the bug is too fundamental to let people 
believe the release will be supported for the next 2 years when a lot of 
devices with embedded low-tech tcp/ip stacks will never work.

> Unfortunately, if I only compare roughly how many changes there where on the
> very same file between Hardy and Intrepid this is 46 and over 600 in the ipv4
> directories (ok, this include netfilter). So it sounds like a search for the needle in the haystack.
> The question is, is there any hint you can read from your logs about what might be
> going wrong (missing packets or too many or whatever) which might get mapped to a certain description in the kernel changelogs?

Yes, I understand what is required. Leave it with me for now and I'll do 
some traces on intrepid over the weekend. I will let you know what I've 
found asap. Once I have a good grasp of the protocol issues, then it 
will be time to start looking at the code. (After 15 years with C and 
C++, I jumped ship to java as soon as it was released and never looked 
back... occasionally that experience comes in useful).

By the way, is there any hope that Ilpo could help you back-port his 
fixes? He must be uniquely qualified to choose the minimum set of changes.

Thanks for becoming involved in this bug - I thought I'd be on my own 
when the bug report laid dormant for two months. A problem shared is a 
problem halved!

Brian