Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Directed broadcasts on Ascend



> This *is* a new feature, but it is also set to maintains backward
> compatibility because the implementation prior to the new option
> did forward "by default". 
> 
> If anyone was using this "feature" prior to the upgrade, and we had
> the default set to "no"...guess what they would be saying. Since we
> did add a new option and documented it, we would expect that it's
> setting would be investigated by those interested in the new option.
> 
> Just *my* 2c.

And my 2c is that the Smurf problem is different then the usual things
we have to deal with.

It is unique in that your network is attacked not because YOUR network is
unprotected, but because 5 thousand other networks are unprotected. You
cannot compel people to fix the problem because they don't work for you.
Worse, you couldn't do it anyway, there are too many of them.

The fact is that there are a lot of people out there that simply aren't
aware that they should be turning off this functionality.

I understand your point too, but I think holding back on turning on new
features, thereby making the default configuration an obselete one, is
too big a price for backward compatibility.

A great compromise is to use version levels, like sendmail. When a
sendmail configuration file is identified by a version level less than the
current one, sendmail emulates an older (probably stupider and probably
broken) version of sendmail. When you build a configuration from scratch
and use the current version level, all the defaults are contemporary.

Should I make a feature request for version levels? :-)

-Phil
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