"broadcast ping" message

[Jamie Bowden]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, John Polstra wrote:

> In article <Pine.GSO.4.53.0304152157070.20388 at granville.cs.ubc.ca>,
> Kan Cai  <kcai at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
> >
> > This is a really dumb question. When I say it doesn't work, I mean there
> > is no output on the screen as you do point-to-point ping normally.
> >
> > Actually it works, it won't show anything just because there is no
> > ack for broadcasting. Using tcpdump can easily notice this thing.
>
> 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?

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 <alaric at alaric.org.uk>