From: "Geo" 

"Chris"  wrote in message news:41fa6fcf{at}w3.nls.net...
> Can someone educate (tell) me as to what the "ping of death" is?  (but
> not a lesson from the "school of hard knocks"), please.  Thanks!

Ping packets can be up to 64K long, when you send a ping the computer that
responds echo's that ping back plus a little bit more. So if you send a
packet that has a length of 65508 or more the return packet is longer than
64K and if the tcp/ip stack isn't doing proper checking it will overflow a
buffer or something and crash.

the old ping.exe from NT4 can send a POD but newer versions were patched to
check and not allow you to send a length greater than 65506 or so. I saved
the original exe when I discovered this "patch"..

Basically all you do is

ping x.x.x.x -l 65508

and that one packet kills the target if it's susceptable. Today most
everything is not susceptable but there are still a few things that are.
I've found a few newer devices that would die from a POD (like a wireless
router I have) so I like to test things and drive the manufacturer crazy
when I find one that is susceptable.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5