FreeBsd as internet router

[Brooks Davis]

[cc'ing doc since I think this is really a doc issue.  Please trim your
reply list as needed]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 04:53:14PM -0600, Skylar Thompson wrote:
> 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.

It's highly unlikely that any router ever built met every requirement
of every relevant RFC at the time it shipped.  As the above example
demonstrates, doing so would not only be practically impossible, but
quite stupid to boot.  This paragraph should be taken out and shot.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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