Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!PARK-STREET.BBN.COM!brescia From: brescia@PARK-STREET.BBN.COM (Mike Brescia) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: broadcast pings Message-ID: <8809261830.AA24376@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 23 Sep 88 13:49:09 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 26 It seems we have started one of those "tastes great!" - "less filling!"* arguments again. Should every station reply to a broadcast of some kind? NO: it causes massive collisions. YES: it helps manage the net by finding formerly unknown stations and diagnosing problems caused by heavy bursts of traffic Perhaps you should put a broadcast detector in your copy of ping, so that it will only send one packet, instead of one per second, as its default. The main point is that you do not want to have the massive collisions occur while people are really trying to get work done. Also, I think that the NO answer works best for connection protocols like TCP, and that the YES answer may be useful for datagram protocols like ICMP/ECHO or UDP/RWHO. Mike *Apologies to people who don't see U.S. television ads; this refers to a series of commercials for a 'lite' malt beverage which allege there are 2 partisan groups which favor it, for different reasons. (I could start a whole new argument about the benefits/curses of beer ... but that belongs on another mailing list.)