> If it helps, these weird negative pings also happen to other hosts...
For what it's worth, I once had this problem when pinging other hosts (not
loopback.) It led me to discover that I had a bad ethernet card. tcpdump
showed that I was getting corruption on return packets over the wire;
since the numbering in the icmp packets was corrupted (it was actually bit
shifted, leading to nice, symmetric data patterns), the timestamps which
ping showed were wrong in a way similar to yours.
Since you're seeing it both to local and to foreign hosts, I would guess
that the kernel may be corrupting your packets internally somehow. If
other traffic is not affected, look for recent changes in
~lin/net/ipv4/icmp.c, as well as the generic ip code.
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Todd Graham Lewis MindSpring Enterprises tlewis@mindspring.com