Thought I should summarize what I found out about this problem. (Will also update http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Wikilearn/PingWrongDataByte0Bug.)
RESOLUTION: Turns out that the ping I was / am using is "obsolete" and it seems the bug does not exist in recent versions of ping (AFAIK). DISCUSSION: I am using Mandrake 7.2 (UpdateFreq) for my mail server, and use ping to confirm my connection is up. The ping provided with Mandrake 7.2 comes from the "netkit" package. It has (or at least had, as of version 0.17), the bug described below. Mandrake 8.2 (and possibly earlier versions, after 7.2) uses a ping that comes with the iputils package, and it seems that it does not have the problem. The difference -- netkit assigns a number to each outgoing ping and checks for that number on the return ping -- iputils just includes a date stamp, and apparently confirms the ping based on the return date stamp (or maybe doesn't confirm that the return ping matches the incoming ping -- I read some of the code (poorly) and corresponded with Alexey Kuznetsov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, who is apparently the maintainer. This is quoted from the last correspondence (of four or five) I had from him: <quote> > Thanks! I suspect that you are saying that your version of > ping does not increment the message on subsequent pings? Not quite. A. Message is never "incremented". B. Any ping _modifies_ the first 8-16 bytes filling them with current wall time. C. This timestamp is used to calculate RTT. D. It is not used to validate data </quote> There is a different maintainer for netkit. Randy Kramer
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