Comment 64 for bug 264019

Revision history for this message
Graham Lyon (eviltwin) wrote : Re: unable to visit some websites and ftpsites with 2.6.27

Just to clarify on my point above, what Nick said about it being people who aren't technically minded being affected by this is what I was attempting to show. On mass, the people who are affected by this will be users who don't read the release notes (I often don't bother, for example, only when downloading RC builds do I generally do that). That means that saying "oh well all they have to do is sudo blah and it will all work" is absolutely pointless. This gives the worst out of the box experience for any linux converts and I am anticipating my girlfriend ringing me at the end of the month because she's upgraded her laptop and the internet no longer works...

If you truly care about ubuntu being "linux for human beings" then you will delay the release to get this fixed - having network access is one of the most fundamental features of the distro. How many threads in the forums are you anticipating seeing of people who can't be bothered to search the forums, don't read the release notes and seem to have internet access issues? (assuming they can get to the forums!)

Let's look at the release notes. First, the description isn't /technically/ accurate: the issue isn't a result of tcp timestamping, it's a result of the ordering and disabling timestamps happens to fix the issue. So, I'm a home user and I'm told I should run the command:
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=0
Great, where do I type that? What's this TCP stuff anyway? Those release notes are written by devs and clearly target devs at some points, you're just not really thinking about who this affects most badly...

As always, feel free to retort my above points...