The story of the Ping program (2001) | Hacker News Reader

The story of the Ping program (2001)

ftp.arl.army.mil

99 pointsfedericoponzi14 comments

I remember reading that Amazon review of "The Story About Ping" shortly after it was published. Still a classic to this day. Excerpt: ...The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

I still laugh reading it--truly satire at its finest.

> I remember reading that Amazon review of "The Story About Ping" shortly after it was published...

I think you mean "shortly after it appeared on Amazon" since the book was old when I was a kid in the 1960s, pre Internet and pre Amazon.

(Or your commend extends the April 1 tradition, which is cool).

Sorry, I meant "shortly after the review was published," not the book. In fact "The Story About Ping" was a favorite children's book of mine when I was young (in the '70s) and I still have that copy.

One thing I never knew about ping is that if you ping a broadcast address, then all hosts will respond! But for some operating systems (windows I think?), you need a packet capture to see this. It's been useful when probing around unknown networks.

I only found that out by reading the source code. It was part of a short-lived attempt to become a better hacker by familiarizing myself with the Linux source code, kernel and all. The more I learn, the more impossible it seems to ever master it all...

You'll be interested in reading about Smurf attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smurf_attack

At one of my first corporate jobs about 20 years ago, I noticed that "nslookup x.y.z.255" actually resolved to a host. I tried to ping it, but got nothing...until I got a phone call from security about why a malicious broadcast ping came from my desktop machine.

Read this some time ago - amazed at how something as ubiquitous as ping started so humbly. Very unfortunate that Muuss passed in 2000.

Interesting that the 'Ping' link to Amazon.com is still working. I wonder if it will still be working in 100 years.

Well if Amazon is still around in 100 years, probably, as the link uses a ASIN [1] which can be converted to an EAN [2] or is equal to 10 digit IBANs

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification...

[2]: http://erwinmayer.com/labs/asin2ean/index.php#EAN-to-ASIN

A couple of previous discussions among https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20story%20of%20the%20Ping%...

Today's online ping program http://pingspeedtest.com/

The link seems to be down.

I can confirm that it's not just you. There is a copy on googlecache[1]

[1]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

2 hours after reading your comment that HN tells me was 2 hours ago in the hour that I read it, the links seems to be up. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com