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Date:      Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:57:55 -0700
From:      Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
To:        Paul Traina <pst@shockwave.com>
Cc:        Andras Olah <olah@cs.utwente.nl>, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Processing ICMP packets (was: -stable hangs at boot (fwd)) 
Message-ID:  <199602291757.KAA03050@rover.village.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 29 Feb 1996 09:04:21 PST

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: It does have special meaning.  Theoretically, you SHOULD be able to say
: "if I get 9 (or 10) I cannot reach that net (or host), period."  However,
: many firewalls generate 9 or 10 (which was obsoleted by 13 for just this
: reason).  13 says "don't assume anything other than this connection attempt
: was refused for administrative reasons."


Just so long as you don't wind up triggering the old 4.2 TCP bug.
Namely, when a port is unreachible, then *ALL* connections to that
host are discarded.  It is safer to silently discard packets in a
packet filter than to send back ICMP messages since it won't trigger
these bugs and will be treateed as if it was lost and retransmitted or
timed out.  If people feel strongly that they want it, then it should
be an option that can be turned off since we have to deal with said
4.2 TCP implementations from time to time and  an accidental
connection could cause us great grief.  If someone has the old TCP
code from then, and can assure me that this won't be a problem because
it doesn't understand type 13 packets, then never mind.  

Warner



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