Bob,
I understand your point, but I think your just not too-hip to EFN... EFN is
a low budget operation. We stretch resources way beyond normal business
limits. So... Many home users have computers well over 1ghz, but EFN doesnt!
EFN runs some reallly old computers! EFN does some amazing service with very
little resources, but part of why they can do it, is by limiting things
pretty dramaticly, and allowing users to "abuse" services. This is why EFN
can support 10,000+ users (EFN broke 10,000 users back in '96 I think... Id
like a more current number, but I simply dont know it....).
So... If EFN had a 450 mhz DNS server, It would only take 4 jerks flooding
EFN with pings (with 450mhz boxen) to effectively halt DNS for hundreds of
dialup users, and coutless other users.
Tragicly EFN cannot afford to allow that sort of thing. business's with
better resources may be better able to deal with such things.
I havnt spent much time using windows networking tools (heck... I just
downloaded putty a couple months ago...) but I belive you can find tools that
run on windows (but not by microsoft...) Others on this list could probably
tell us more specific details about network applications for window.
Jamie
On Friday 12 April 2002 18:36, Bob Miller wrote:
> Patrick R. Wade wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 01:28:46PM -0700, Bob Miller wrote:
> > >Patrick R. Wade wrote:
> > >> 4. EFN nameservers do not respond to ICMP, so pinging them will not
> > >> tell you that they are up.
> > >
> > >Why not? Ping is a useful and widely known tool, so why break it?
> >
> > I believe that the concern was that ping is also a useful and widely
> > known DoS tool, and that since there is only one service that box
> > provides, it is possible to test the box by testing the service...
>
> Let's say I have a Windows box. (Eeeuuugh!) I can test its existence
> using ping from a DOS window. To test its existence using DNS, (I
> think) I'd have to delete all other DNS servers, install that one,
> reboot, look up a host, restore the other DNS servers, and reboot
> again. (Unless there's a Windows tool like dig or nslookup.)
>
> OTOH, ping seems like a pretty poor DoS tool to me. I just hit my box
> with 4 Mbit/sec of pings, and it slowed down 23%. 450 MHz Pentium II.
> I could do a lot more damage with 4 Mbit/sec of DNS queries. (-:
