Talk:Ping of death

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How can you create/send a POD? What has been done on the popular operating systems to prevent this buffer overflow from occuring?

It's probably not possible to do this and 'crash' other machines, as the article states that most machines have been fixed to avoid this. From my limited personal research it seems like it works by sending a packet size of 2^16 (65536) or greater will crash the remote machine.

My question here to add is how this is possible? We regularly send data around via TCP/IP which are obviously greater than 2^16 bytes, but the data is split between two packets of < 65535 bytes.

Anyway the question 'what has been done on the popular operating....' can probably be answered using my hypothesis that the machines are somehow set to not receive packets greater than 2^16-1 bytes. How, I'm not sure :) Piepants 23:26, 8 June 2006 (UTC)Piepants

edit: after some more research, I am reminded that you can specify packet size from ping commands (type ping /? in your command prompt to see how). I'm sure they fixed it, but if you say, chose 'ping -l 65536 [hostname]' (-l means specified buffer size), it would do what was done years ago to 'test' this.

 :) Piepants 23:31, 8 June 2006 (UTC)Piepants

[edit] Killing vandals with PODs

This might make be effective way to fight vandals if it wasn't illegal. Wikipedia users would simply send Pings of death to vandals, and their computers crash!--75.26.13.197 00:42, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

... but you DID read the part about POD bug being fixed since 10 years? 217.196.67.133 14:15, 5 October 2006 (UTC)₦