Note, this is not really a security risk, because the buffer in question
is a static variable in the data segment and not on the stack, and hence
cannot subert the flow of execution in any way. About the worst case was
that if you pinged a long hostname, ping could coredump.
Pointed out on: bugtraq (listserv@netspace.org)
determine whether a connection to a given machine is up or not.
In FreeBSD 2.0 (and therefore, I assume, BSD 4.4) the exit code of ping
is always zero, even if no packets were received.
I would like to propose the following change to /usr/src/sbin/ping/ping.c
to restore this useful behaviour:
Submitted by: Denis Fortin
Print out summary information on receipt of SIGINFO; also, stop the
kernel printing of information and restore it on exit. Now, it needs
an option to be quiet. ;)