“Your upgrade to kernel 2.4.0, or anything later, went
perfectly, or so you thought. You downloaded all the files you
needed, built the kernel, upgraded modutils, and booted. Voila!
Working system! So you played around a bit, decided it was working
fine, and went back to your normal work.”
“Around noontime you decided to check your stock portfolio on
E-Trade or to look at the financial news on the NASDAQ web site.
“Gee!” you thought as your browser failed to connect, “It’s amazing
that both of these major financial sites are down at the same
time!” So you went back to what you were doing. A couple of hours
later they were still unreachable, and you began to wonder if the
problem was really at their end, or at yours.”
“…The problem with Linux 2.4.x and ECN is that not all of
the existing routers and other devices on the Internet can support
ECN. In fact, some older devices actually treat ECN packets as
invalid, and discard them altogether. This explains the problem
with NASDAQ and E-Trade’s web sites, both of which (as of a few
days ago) did not support ECN packets. There are other sites with
this problem as well, and in fact Internet.com had to upgrade some
of its own equipment several months ago as a result of this new
protocol.“