Previous: TTL details, Up: ping: Packets to network hosts [Contents][Index]
Many hosts and gateways ignore the RECORD_ROUTE field, since
the maximum IP header length is far to small to hold all
the routes.
There is not much that can be done about this.
Flood pinging is not recommended in general, and flood pinging the broadcast address should only be done under very controlled conditions.
Some BSD variants offer a kernel setting to inhibit all replies
to ICMP_MASKREQ packets, but in general, Unices are designed either
to answer the request with a valid netmask, or to drop the request,
causing ping to wait for a timeout condition.