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From: HEDRICK@RED.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: surprising property of ICMP redirect on Unix
Message-ID: <12207836738.33.HEDRICK@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Mon, 19-May-86 00:50:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: RED.12207836738.33.HEDRICK
Posted: Mon May 19 00:50:03 1986
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I have discovered, much to my surprise, that on 4.2 (at least on the
Pyramid and Sun) the system will accept an ICMP redirect from anybody
and act on it.  We have used this feature to good effect a few times,
when the core gateways lose track of us.  We have a program redirect
that will send an arbitrary ICMP redirect to an arbitrary host.  We can
often use this to put an entry for our gateway into a foreign host's
routing table, and then establish connections with them.  More
usefully, I intend to use this in our local Ethernet gateways to set up
default routing entries pointing to that gateway.  We are getting so
many Unix systems, managed by so many turk... er... inexperienced system
managers, that we want it to be possible for us to get routing going
without any action on the part of the system manager.  We believe that
we can broadcast an ICMP redirect establishing a routing for host 0
(default) to our gateway.  I have verified that this works when it is
not a broadcast, but have not yet had a chance to try the broadcast
form.  I think that if we do this often enough to prevent the entry from
being purged by routed, we will get the effect we want.  (Actually,
routed should not be running on any of our hosts, but there are enough
... er ... inexperienced system managers around that I am sure it is
being run on many of our hosts.)  If someone sets up a different
default gateway for themselves, our broadcast will cause no trouble,
since a second default entry has no effect.  (Actually, it is probably
a bug that 4.2 creates a second entry rather than changing the
information in the first one.)

This is all very convenient for us, but it does seem to be a bug.
I hope that by the time the bug is fixed, the gateway committee will
have come up with a better way to accomplish this, and it will have
been implemented by all of our Unix vendors.  (say about 1996.)

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