Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!NSIPO.NASA.GOV!medin From: medin@NSIPO.NASA.GOV ("Milo S. Medin", NASA ARC NSI Project Office) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Dumb question: ping w/o icmp support? Message-ID: <8810221819.AA10475@nsipo.arc.nasa.gov> Date: 22 Oct 88 18:19:26 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 21 There are implementations out there that fail to support ICMP. Some that even fail to support default routes! The vendors out there that sell such 'products' are committing crimes against the Internet community, since we have to debug problems involving such. Some vendors which you wouldn't suspect don't even do ARP! I personally know of several implementations which are broken in the above ways, but I'd probably get sued if I spoke up on the net. I'll let the poor users who got this stuff because of a 'lowest bid' procurement speak up themselves. If any of you vendors that are broken read this note, shame on you for building defective stuff! One thing though, most of these implementations find homes on the MILNET, which still has many hosts directly connected and not relying on gateways as much as the rest of us... I think DARPA missed the boat here; they should have registered TCP/IP as a registered trademark like ADA, and required certification. Milo