How about taking this to linux-kernel for discussion since it appears to be
a development kernel bug possibly?
-d
On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Wietse Venema wrote:
> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 10:38:36 -0500
> From: Wietse Venema <wietse@PORCUPINE.ORG>
> To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
> Subject: Update: Subtle data corruption of TCP streams
>
> Apparently, once instance of this data corruption problem is caused
> by an unnamed bandwidth management system. It runs as a bridge,
> and does not show up in traceroute etc. output. We were able to
> estimate its location (at 5 ms round-trip time from one endpoint)
> by analyzing packet arrival times.
>
> Until now, this TCP data corruption problem has been observed only
> when one of the connection endpoints runs a recent LINUX version.
> Sightings have been reported by sites in Germany and in France.
>
> Only recent LINUX versions request the use of timestamp options
> that cause the tell-tale patterns of "01 01 08 0a" in TCP packets,
> and that end up being regurgitated as ^A^A^H^J data.
>
> I have updated the analysis at ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/pub/debugging/
>
> Wietse
>
> Wietse Venema:
> > This note is about a subtle data corruption problem with TCP data
> > streams that may bite people as more and more (LINUX) systems are
> > sending network traffic with TCP-level options turned on.
> >
> > Last week, several Postfix users reported mail delivery failures
> > because sequences of control characters (for example, ^A^A^H) were
> > being inserted into their SMTP connections, resulting in SMTP
> > protocol errors and non-delivery of email.
> >
> > These data corruption problems are not host specific: they are
> > observed with both Linux and BSD/OS systems, and with mail sent to
> > and/or received from systems running Postfix, Sendmail and qmail.
> >
> > Over the weekend of March 18, 2000, a few people left tcpdump
> > running on their machines, in order to record some of these corrupted
> > SMTP sessions. This note is based on an analysis of that data.
>
-
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