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Re: ping.

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Can Altineller wrote:

> 	However in OpenBSD the identifier field is different every time
> that a ICMP_ECHO_REQUEST|REPLY is sent. In FreeBSD it is not the same, but
> it is sequential. (increases by one)

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this is to stem some infoleak.
Do you really want the outside world to know the PIDs of commands running
on your machine?  Especially commands that run with elevated privilege?
	
> 	Let's say Theo coded this differently then other *BSD's to confuse
> the fuck out of me; then how does the ping program, or any other program

More importantly to confuse the fuck out of everyone who isn't you.

> that sends ICMP's keep track of them? 

By keeping a list of send packets?  By hashing the sequence and some piece
of static data.  Beats me, I would look at the source code if I were really
that interested.
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