19 Dec
1996
19 Dec
'96
10:29 p.m.
In fact, responding to pings does not directly affect the speed of the hardware forwarding engine. However, it does increase buffer utilization in the hardware. It also deters routing protocol processing from happening, as it's consuming CPU.
The fact remains that a ping packet stream a Linux 386SX would barely notice maxes out a 7010 (far more powerful CPU) that otherwise runs at 30% with no difficulty whatsoever and causes all sorts of problems (like it looses all its BGP sessions). Rather and obvious DoS attack, and one which even MS were red faced enough to fix in their NT s/w pretty sharpish. Alex Bligh Xara Networks