On September 1993 plus 3576 days Greg Meyer wrote: > On Tuesday 17 June 2003 12:48 pm, Anne Wilson wrote: >> When the important problem-solving is over - (whisper) could someone >> explain to me about martians? > > Sure Anne, they are little green men that come from the planet Mars :-D. > > Seriously though, my understanding is that they are tcp packets that appear to > have no sender. In other words, they have come from nowhere, yet they are > everywhere. Some device sends out a packet with an improperly configured > header which does not identify the source.
Actually, that's only part of the whole thing :) A martian packet is one that comes from a network that shouldn't be sending packets to that interface. If you get a packet from 192.168.1.54 on your public (ie. internet) interface, it'll get marked as martian because a packet from a private interface shouldn't come to the public interface. Same happens with improper headers without identifying source...they get marked as martians because the interface can't confirm it comes from a valid source. Vox -- Think of the Linux community as a niche economy isolated by its beliefs. Kind of like the Amish, except that our religion requires us to use _higher_ technology than everyone else. -- Donald B. Marti Jr.
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