In this episode, Matt (having dodged Hurricane Irene) and Cricket (having recently returned from South America) grovel and scrape after a nearly-three-month hiatus, then answer questions from Jorge Fábregas about whether to allow ICMP to authoritative name servers; from Donnie Carvajal about how to resolve a private, internal domain name; and from Leo Vandewoestijne about mismatched NS RRsets. Along the way, they learn a nice trick from Leo about how to convey proper pronunciation to fellow Mac owners, lament their inability to pronounce their own surnames correctly, and probably cause Olafur Gudmundsson to spit coffee all over his laptop.
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Funny (or really sad depending on your perspective) you should mention the Ping of Death as it recently became clear that Microsoft made a similair mistake when they rewrote the TCP/IP-stack which they introduced with Vista.
So after all these years, a Ping of Death is possible again. So blocking ICMP requests might actually have a legitimate reason right now.
Here is the fix:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-064
However there is currently no widely know exploit code, so it probably isn’t actively being abused right now.
Although it might be a reason for some hosting providers to block certain packets.
Posted by Leen Besselink on September 8th, 2011.