File: inetutils.info,  Node: Further remarks,  Prev: TTL details,  Up: ping invocation

7.6 Further observations
========================

Many hosts and gateways ignore the 'RECORD_ROUTE' field, since the
maximum IP header length is far to small to hold all the routes.  There
is not much that can be done about this.

   Flood pinging is not recommended in general, and flood pinging the
broadcast address should only be done under very controlled conditions.

   Some BSD variants offer a kernel setting to inhibit all replies to
ICMP_MASKREQ packets, but in general, Unices are designed either to
answer the request with a valid netmask, or to drop the request, causing
'ping' to wait for a timeout condition.