Linux 2.2.16 through 2.2.18preX TCP hang bug triggered by rsync

[Dave Dykstra]

Ville Herva <[e-mail]> suggested I post this bug report here and that
possibly David Miller or Alexey Kuznetsov could help out.  I found the
problem back at the end of October and narrowed it down as much as I could
but didn't know where to report it until now.  For complete details please
see the rsync mailing list archive at
    http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-October/003004.html
and some of the preceding and following messages.  In particular, the next
message
    http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-October/003005.html
is an interpretation of the TCP dump by my co-worker which implicates the
Linux side.  Also, in
    http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-October/002985.html
Andrew Tridgell refers to a TCP patch that went into Linux kernel 2.2.17
and that "Stephen" told him about it but I don't know what Stephen he was
referring to; that fix didn't help anyway.

The first message above refers to a set of data that could possibly be used
to reproduce the problem, but unfortunately nobody else has reported to me
that they have successfully reproduced it.  I only saw the failures when
using rsync to pull to a particular Solaris 7 workstation, but it happened
when pulling from two different Linux machines and three different kernels
but no other type of machine.  Another message
    http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-October/002981.html
gives a more complete rsync command for reproducing the problem.  The
original report at
    http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-October/002964.html
says that I first noticed the problem on Linux kernel 2.2.16-3smp.

- Dave Dykstra