On Thursday 12 April 2007 07:12, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> Most modern ICMP/IP implementations aren't going to respond to broadcast
> pings anyway, so pinging a broadcast address in an attempt to discover
> hosts is going to produce dubious results.
Okay, thanks for the info, but that doesn't matter to the question whether
ping's behaviour is correct.
> Resolving this bug, as I don't believe any aspect of ping's behavior
> should change.
I wouldn't simply close this. The point is that the behaviour of ping is
inconsistent, albeit in the context of me doing something
dubious/stupid/useless. If I ping a broadcast address, ping _must_ expect
multiple answers, because it is by definition a one-to-many ping. Therefore,
waiting must not terminate after the first answer, too, because it is
not 'the answer' but just 'an answer'.
In that context, a proper error-message would also be welcome. Even when
broadcasting, ping still claims duplicate answers, as if those were
unexpected. Yes, it does give a warning that I'm pinging a broadcast address
(heck, I explicitly requested!) but not why that might be a bad idea.
At the very least, this inconsistency should be documented in the manpage (I
didn't check if you did so already). Also, there you should note what you
wrote above, i.e. that broadcast pings are often useless and that a ping
sweep across the network would be better. Also, I'd consider marking this bug
as WONTFIX, so the next person stumbling across the behaviour can find an
explanation in the Debian BTS.
thanks
Uli
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