It has come to my attention... or rather, it has BIT ME IN MY F'ING ASS, that at a bare minimum, the Gentoo 2.4.18-XFS kernel TCP stack is b0rked.

I suspect this particular bug is a lower level issue, and affects the base 2.4.18 source tree, not just the Gentoo XFS sources.

Anyway, my point being, if you are running 2.4.18 and are having ANY sort of network issues/latency/SYN errors, etc..., you need to upgrade to 2.4.19 or later.

I spent the better part of a month looking over ACLs, routing tables, IPTables configs, and a grip of other things... and finally, finally after many LD calls to California, Washington and several other states, we've tracked it down to the stupid broken IP stack in the 2.4.18 kernel rev. Go figure. It was an utter nightmare, and I don't want anyone else to go through this henious attempt to solve a network issue that really isn't.

From this point forward, if you aren't running a kernel rev beyond 2.4.18, I'm going to blame any network issues you have on the broken stack. Be forewarned! I don't want to ever hear about 2.4.18 again. ARRRRG