On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 17:52:17 -0500, Vox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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
I had an experience with martians recently. I was getting connection attempts from 192.168.100.1. I initially told my firewall to block all invalid addresses, but a day later I discovered that it was my cable modem (Motorola Surfboard SB3100). The device had a full Web configuration interface and its own DHCP server, and I only discovered this three years after buying it! I'm not slow, I'm just fashionably late! :) -- Sridhar Dhanapalan [Yama | http://www.pclinuxonline.com/] {PGP/GnuPG: http://dhanapalan.com/yama.asc 049D38B4 | A7A9 8A02 78CB AB1B FCE4 EEC6 2DD9 249B 049D 38B4} "And I have to say that I absolutely despise the BSD people... Oh, well. Not everybody can be as goodlooking as me. It's a curse." -- Linus Torvalds
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