Mail servers

Walt Howard howard at rumba.ee.ualberta.ca
Fri Oct 3 23:09:08 UTC 2003


In article <blkb9k$1sdj$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
Gadget Williams  <dombidcorp at ameritech.net> wrote:
>Never assume that ICMP is going to be a valid method to diagnose
>problems.

So far, so good.

>Most firewalls should be dropping that garbage.

No they shouldn't.  Drop some of it, OK.  Rate-limit it, surely.  But if
you drop all of it, you lose things like the ability to do path MTU
discovery.  ICMP exists for good reasons, and you SHOULD (in the RFC2119
sense) use it, carefully.

>I am amazed that Yahoo still let's you ping it...

Maybe they have concluded that there are more pros than cons to ICMP
echos.


-- 
Walt Howard                         /"\  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
InterNet: whoward at ieee.org          \ /  No HTML in mail or news!
BellNet: +1 780 492 6306             X
                                    / \


More information about the bind-users mailing list