Bugtraq: Re: udp packet storms

[perry () imsi com (Perry E. Metzger)]

You miss the point. It is unrelated to responding to broadcast pings
-- thats perfectly fine behavior. The problem is one of sending to the
broadcast address by accident, because that allows you to reply to a
packet who's source address is the broadcast address without realizing
that you might do so.

.pm

Mike Raffety says:
> At my REQUEST, Wellfleet changed the behavior of their router software
> so that it WOULD respond to broadcast pings (ones aimed at networks
> on which the router has an interface directly attached, that is).  In
> general, routers do NOT know that a particular packet is directed to a
> broadcast address; that's up to the end router to deal with, setting
> a broadcast MAC address in the final hop.
>
> I frequently use "broadcast pings" to see what's on a network.