The Story of the PING Program:

I quickly coded up the PING program, which revolved around opening an ICMP style SOCK_RAW AF_INET Berkeley-style socket(). The code compiled just fine, but it didn't work -- there was no kernel support for raw ICMP sockets! Incensed, I coded up the kernel support and had everything working well before sunrise. Not surprisingly, Chuck Kennedy (aka "Kermit") had found and fixed the network hardware before I was able to launch my very first "ping" packet. But I've used it a few times since then. *grin* If I'd known then that it would be my most famous accomplishment in life, I might have worked on it another day or two and added some more options.

The network nightmare that ate my week | Occasionally Coherent:

I used Ubuntu as an example, but it is hardly the worst offender. We have seen Windows machines with more than 300 IPv6 addresses — which, recall, means that every 150 seconds they will be transmitting 30 multicast packets per second which have to be flooded through the network.

After reading a lot about various evil ISPs and other such fun I decided it would be good to have a self-controlled VPN server out there for when I am using a device of mine on a network I’m not so sure about. I could pay someone else for this, sure, but I already have a server “out there” that’s not being used to its fullest capabilities and I’m pretty handy with the Linux and the vi so … why not?