[148] in linux-net channel archive
Re: New Stuff
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kai Henningsen)
Mon Mar 27 00:04:37 1995
Date: 24 Mar 1995 23:00:00 +0100
From: kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)
To: linux-net@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <m0rrSqb-00013hC@iiit.swan.ac.uk>
iialan@iifeak.swan.ac.uk wrote on 22.03.95 in <m0rrSqb-00013hC@iiit.swan.ac.uk>:
> I've uploaded a snapshot of the first beginnings of the merging of various
> outstanding pieces of code, the original pre-1.3 work which has slipped way
> behind because Linus did about 50 more 1.1.x releases than I had
> anticipated.
Are there any plans (or even existing features I was too stupid to find)
of - well, don't know if there's an official name for it - negative
routes? With that I mean an entry that says "I _know_ that a.b.c.d is
unreachable. If you see a packet with that address, send back an ICMP
unreachable."
Linux already knows how to do it as long as you don't have a default route
- simply have _no_ route in the table. However, that's not practical if
you are on the Internet; you _need_ a default route then.
The situation I'm thinking of is a SLIP server - as long as a client is
not connected, we _know_ it's unreachable, how do we tell the net?
Currently, the default route kicks in which is, of course, complete
nonsense.
I can come up with a patch that defines special IP adresses to give ICMP
unreachable messages with all the codes (in fact, I have), however I don't
consider that a sensible solution :-)
MfG Kai
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