Exploring ping's hidden countermeasure messages for clock adjustments
By
moonleay
Pure flour-power. Hearty enough to carry you through lunch.
Summary
A developer humorously recounts returning from holidays and running a ping command to check network connectivity, only to discover that the ping utility displays a witty message about "taking countermeasures" when the system clock is adjusted (e.g., after waking from sleep). The article explores the cleverness of this edge-case handling in the ping software, questioning how thoroughly the developers implemented such features, including handling clock changes in both directions, excluding bad measurements from statistics, and testing methodologies.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledI was not expecting ping to take countermeasures th
Debugging the network is a mandatory first step after a boot, right?
Ping developers clearly put some thought into that.
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