Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrstp!npdiss1!mercer From: mercer@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: IP numbers that end in 0 ... Message-ID: <563@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM> Date: 28 Aug 90 22:26:35 GMT References: <13391@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> Reply-To: mercer@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) Organization: StPaul Lines: 31 In article <13391@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> dls@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (David L Stevens) writes: : : I've seen two articles now that suggest that it is legitimate to :filter directed broadcasts if the gateway thought they were. Note that it :is wrong to do so, at least for destinations, in the first place. It is :perfectly legitimate for me to address a broadcast packet to a remote network. : I could see where a gateway might arguably drop packets whose source :address is a broadcast address, but that's a little more intrusive than I'd :want a gateway to be. The host can and should take responsibility for that :sort of checking. A gateway should just do ttl, checksum and routing and :leave everything else alone. : So even if these routers did have the right sense of what a broadcast :packet on a remote network is, which they can't have, they should not be :discarding those packets. :-- : +-DLS (dls@mentor.cc.purdue.edu) I disagree - it is a perfectly legitimate function for routers to perform message filtering. Before we hooked to the Internet, we set up our routers to prohibit certain types of traffic - it was far easier to manage the change in the one router than have to migrate it through the entire net (dozens, nay scores, of machines). In addition, the functionality we wanted to restrict we only wanted to restrict to outsiders. -- Dan Mercer Reply-To: mercer@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) "MAN - the only one word oxymoron in the English Language"