At 07:11 PM 3/26/00 +0200, Eric Delcamp wrote:
>-2- Why the hell, when installing from FTP, do you ping the gateway ? The
>ping should be only on the DNS or the FTP site, but NOT THE GATEWAY. If you
>have a firewall/gateway and declare it hidden in both side, ping failed. Bad
>thing. Maybe a question before doing this ?

For that matter, lots of paranoid people these days seem to be blocking
ping to *anything* (they read an alarmist press report about "Ping of
Death" some time back, and never bothered to read release notes of their OS
saying it was no longer vulnerable). It's easy to declare that such
machines have a "broken configuration", but much more difficult to pound it
into the admin's head that having ping open on a machine that is publicly
accessible for other functions is a valuable debugging aid.

Of course, I haven't encountered any of these problem when installing
NetBSD, because the DNS, ftp, and gateway are always under my control (and
I hardly ever use sysinst anyway), so I don't know what sysinst does when
these machines aren't pingable. Printing a warning and giving an option to
reenter the addresses, or to continue, would be okay; refusing to continue
wouldn't.