Re: "broadcast ping" message

Jamie Bowden <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.os.freebsd.devel.mobile
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Larry Rosenman wrote:

> --On Wednesday, April 16, 2003 10:58:20 -0700 John Polstra
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > In article <[email protected]>,
> > Jamie Bowden  <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, John Polstra wrote:
> >>
> >> > To make a FreeBSD system respond to broadcast pings, you have to set
> >> > the sysctl variable net.inet.icmp.bmcastecho to 1.
> >>
> >> Shouldn't the default be to DTRT and respond unless disabled?  Until now,
> >> the only systems on my network that didn't respond to broadcast pings
> >> were my windows boxes, but I consider them broken by default.  Why has
> >> the default behavior changed, and isn't this a POLA issue?
> >
> > It was changed for security reasons.  Responding to broadcast pings
> > creates several potential denial of service attacks.
> It's also against current best practices for ISP's.  Even Cisco changed the
> routers
> to NOT respond to directed-broadcast by default.
>
> The RFC was NOT written for today's internet.

Then submit a draft for a superceding RFC, don't ignore it just because
it's inconvenient.  That's a Microsoft attitude.

Jamie Bowden

-- 
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold"
Hunter S Tolkien "Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur"
Iain Bowen <[email protected]>


_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-mobile
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.