Re: [tlug] Ping vs www server

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-04-18 11:49 +0900 (Fri), Josh Glover wrote:

> Again, trade-offs where my calculation and yours differ. As long as we
> both have made the calculation, I see no problem here.

My complaint is having that calculation made for me. I seems to be the
typical state of Windows boxes with a firewall built in to go into
"stealth" mode, leading to several minutes of debugging while I try to
figure out if the machine is actually on the network or not.

Even more annoying than the lack of ability to ping is that when I'm
trying to connect to a server that may or may not be running on a
Windows box that may or may not have successfully connected to the
network and gotten an address, I have to keep in mind that it won't even
have the courtesy to tell me that it's not listening on a particular
port, insteading pretending that it's not on the network.

And this "drop ICMP" stuff, beyond merely making debugging difficult,
causes a great amount of harm on a regular basis, even destroying
network connectivity. Though I've not seen much of it lately, the
early 2000s were filled with loss of connectivity due to incorrectly
configured firewalls dropping the ICMP responses needed for path MTU
detection.

So no, I'm not going to agree that your tradeoff is well thought out.

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
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