Re: [tlug] Ping vs www server

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > On 18/04/2008, SL Baur <steve@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > On 4/17/08, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
 > >
 > >  > Yes, I do. I consider turning off ICMP a good tradeoff,
 > >
 > > It used to be that that was fairly stupid practice as it hamstrung the higher
 > >  level protocols - there's a lot more to ICMP than ECHO, or at least there
 > >  used to be.
 > 
 > Looking down the list of ICMP message types on p71 of TCP/IPI:VI[1], I
 > see very little that is used by modern routing protocols.

Look, let's put it this way.  If you block ICMP, you're not part of
the solution, you're part of the problem, because you are saying "I'm
going to *use* the Internet, but not *be part of* it.  See RFC 1122,
sections 3.2.2.6 and 4.2.5.  As I wrote earlier, *if* you walk that
walk (i.e., your internal hosts do not have access to the Internet
except via application gateways which do implement the RFCs), no
problem.  But the policy of allowing ports 25 and 80 through to
internal servers, while blocking ICMP, is evil (but then, we already
knew that about Tsukuba-Die).

This "use but don't support" POV is the way corporations look at the
Internet, anyway, so it's no big deal for them.  But open source
software advocates should be very sad about it.  The standards are all
we have.

This is one thing I dislike about Ubuntu.  They talk the talk of
cooperation and empowerment, but really they're not into doing much of
that themselves.  The one I ran into the other day is a proliferation
of bzr+yyy schemes in URLs used by bzr.  Well, it turns out that the
relevant RFC reserves all scheme names not containing a dash to future
standarization.  That means that all they have to do to fix their URLs
is to change the scheme to bzr-yyy, or prepend "bzr-" to private
schemes!  Sure, this *change* would be troublesome, but as yet they
have a negligible market share and are aiming for a big one, bzr is
the native VCS for Launchpad, which they hope will share the trough
equally with Savannah and SourceForge, they make incompatible changes
in bzr on a quarterly basis anyway, and they can continue to recognize
the old schemes for a long time.  Now is a good time to do it.

Subversion is guilty of the same, well, subversion[1] of the standards.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Hi, Scott!