It appears that I've jumped the gun a bit and I apologize. It appears
certain devices (more than one, and a suspected particular brand/model#)
in our network send malformed responses to some ping requests, and
apparently linux cares about this, while some other OSes don't, hence
making it look like something is wrong with linux and/or the ping
utility. The problem is that the devices in question were sending the
wrong identifier field back in the ICMP reply, so even though they were
showing up in Ethereal, they were not being forwarded on to that
instance of the ping utility. Perhaps a warning or note could be added
to the man page and/or help for ping mentioning the necessity of
matching identifiers.
In this case, according to Ethereal:
REQUEST:
Type: 8
Code: 0
Checksum: 0x7f3a
Identifier: 0x5e0f
Sequence number: 0x0009
REPLY:
Type: 0
Code: 0
Checksum: 0x9e3a
Identifier: 0x3c0f
Sequence number: 0x0009
Data (56 bytes)
The ICMP RFC says the identifier field "may" be used to match up
requests/replys, hence why some hosts may appear to still be able to
ping the device in question, and some can't (personally I prefer using
the idenfier field, it disambiguises in a multitasking situation).
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