FreeBsd as internet router

[Skylar Thompson]

Ong Beng Hui wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Looking thru the FreeBSD handbook...
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html
>
> and Advanced Networking...
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/advanced-networking.html 
>
>
> Under Building a Router, it said...
>
> "Even when FreeBSD is configured in this way, it does not completely 
> comply with the Internet standard requirements for routers. It comes 
> close enough for ordinary use, however."
>
> Could someone advise, in what way FreeBSD doesn't comply with Internet
> standard requirements for routers ? Which internet standard it might be
> referencing to. 


The first thing that comes to mind is that FreeBSD doesn't pass on 
network broadcast packets by default. This violates RFC1812 
<ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1812.txt>, which mandates that 
subnet broadcast packets must be passed on as specified in STD3 
<ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/std/std3.txt>. This actually is no 
longer good practice, so I'd say it's more prudence than an outright 
design flaw that FreeBSD doesn't comply with this.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar at cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/

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