TCP_Timestamps and failed connections

[Jeffrey Ross]

System is Fedora Core 3. 

I attempted to connect to eBay, the ip address was 216.113.103.100 this 
is one of their cgi servers (cgi-core.ebay.com).  Originally I noticed 
that I was unable to completely load pages from them.  Further 
investigation showed that it was only to certain IP addresses.  After 
some additional looking I found that a Windoze machine was able to 
connect to this address with no problem.

after looking at a network trace I found that the Linux machine 
correctly sent a SYN packet but no SYN/ACK was returned.  The windows 
machine sent the SYN and promptly got a SYN/ACK in response.  There were 
obvious differences in the options used in the SYN packet, primarily TCP 
Timestamps were enabled on the Linux system.  After disabling the 
Timestamps connectivity was restored.

The question now is, who's broken? Linux or eBay?  Of course it probably 
doesn't matter as eBay is probably not going to fix the system as the 
majority of their users us Windoze.

Lastly, this eBay server responded with "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0"

Ideas other than leaving TCP Timestamps disabled?

Jeff