Different behavior of ping'ing INADDR_BROADCAST?

[LI Xin]

Dear colleagues,

I have a strange question about our way of handling INADDR_BROADCAST,
the behavior looks different from all other operating systems I have
tried, except Mac OS X ;-)

By ping'ing 255.255.255.255 from FreeBSD (mostly RELENG_6 with some
unrelated patches) or Mac OS X, I got response from another subnet (I
guess that there is some configuration problem in the network, though),
but no boxes (running various operating systems) on local network
responds the ping.

However, with OpenBSD, Linux and Windows, ping'ing 255.255.255.255 would
get response from local network.

Just curious why there is such difference.  Literally, I think
INADDR_BROADCAST is supposed to reach local network nodes, no?

Cheers,
-- 
Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net>	http://www.delphij.net/
FreeBSD - The Power to Serve!

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