On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, YOSHIFUJI Hideaki / ^[$B5HF#1QL@^[(B wrote:
I missed the beginning of the discussion, so apologies if I'm way off
base.
it sounds like the question is, when a packet hits the box that causes a
icmp_reply (or other packet) to be generated, which IP address should be
used as the source
1. the destination address of the packet that generated the message
or.
2. the IP address that the machine would use by default if the machine
were to generate a new connection to the destination.
I understand that in many cases the historical approach has been #2, but
as more machines get multiple IP addresses on each interface, I believe
that it's less of a surprise to other systems if the default is #1. most
of the time the other systems don't care (and useusally don't want to
know) if the service they are contacting is on a dedicated machine or is
just one IP among many sharing a box.
it gets especially bad when you have load balancing going on and the
results could come from multiple boxes.
yes, sysadmins deal with this today, but it's a pain to do so and is a
continuing dribble of suprises when things don't quite work the way you
expect them to as you consoldate things onto more powerful systems (or
distribute them among multiple systems).
if the packet got to the machine and the machine is accepting it, replying
back from the destination IP of that packet should be legitimate (it's
what you would do if there was a full connection after all) and greatly
reduces the cases where things change.
David Lang
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