[olug] VNC w/Qwest

[Luke -Jr]

On Monday 15 October 2007, Obi-Wan wrote:
> >> I'm not even able to ping his IP.
> >
> > Then quite frankly, a network is misconfigured.
> > You should always be able to ping a used IP address.
>
> Alas, that's not true.  Pings are just another type of network packet,
> and are quite commonly blocked by firewalls.  I often run into situations
> where a company allows HTTP in, but not ICMP.  Makes debugging a PITA.

ICMP is a network infrastructure protocol. Networking standards assume it is 
always in place. For example, DHCP uses pings to determine if an address is 
in use. IP autoconfiguration generally will not work at all without ICMP.
Even if you do not need these standards, disabling ICMP is still broken.