Re: pingd >> Should it be ported on Debian??
> > Anyway, the author of the site is working on a security focussed OS
> > based on Linux. One of the "improvements" that he has made was a ping
> > deamon wich can be controlled via the TCP wrappers.
> I'm not sure I see any great benefit from it though - the kernel still has
> to understand ICMP (for port unreachables etc), so all it achieves is
dropping
> a few bits of ICMP response code from the kernel. ICMP filtering is doable
with
> ipchains etc anyway. Debian don't ship heavily patched kernels, so unless
this
> happened upstream it's unlikely to appear in Debian.
I'd say it's not worth doing because, TCP wrappers really is designed for
authorising connections, and with ICMP you do not have a TCP connection
between Source IP/port and Destination IP/port, so you cannot use ident or
similar. It sounds a broken idea, you don't use wrappers for authorisation
of UDP protocols for instance, without the 3-way handshake there's no
defense against packets with spoofed source addresses.
But perhaps this daemon is actually providing a different service,
allowing test of inetd and higher levels of stack (not unknown for a machine
to respond to ping, even if it's hung). Even then I'm not sure what value
it has, as if you run a web server for instance, your best check that it's
up and available, is to use expect(1) and telnet onto port 80.
Rob
Reply to: