That’s why blogging works! I reported last Friday on using my Wii for reading Scintilla and Postgenomic.com. Alf replied:

It is the Linux kernel, yes: TCP window scaling was switched on by default in kernels since about a year ago (and in Vista too, I think), and one of our routers or firewalls doesn’t like it. We’re trying to get them upgraded, but it takes a while…

Ah, the trick word: TCP windows scaling. A quick google turned up a workaround in John’s Tidbits blog:

There are 2 quick fixes. First you can simply turn off windows scaling all together by doing

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling

but that limits your window to 64k. Or you can limit the size of your TCP buffers back to pre 2.6.17 kernel values which means a wscale value of about 2 is used which is acceptable to most broken routers.

echo “4096 16384 131072” > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem echo “4096 87380 174760” > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem

The original values would have had 4MB in the last column above which is what was allowing these massive windows.

In a thread somewhere which I can’t find anymore Dave Miller had a great quote along the lines of

“I refuse to workaround it, window scaling has been part of the protocol since 1999, deal with it.”

That worked for me. I think Dave Miller is right, but can’t resist reading Scintilla and Postgenomic.com on my desktop too ;)

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2007/11/scintilla-and-postgenomiccom-on-linux.html.