Eric Martin wrote:
Have you tried to ping the loopback address? I know that a fried card won't respond to lo replies (127.0.0.1) in Windows, but I'm not sure what the behavior is in *NIX. That being said, if the loopback interface isn't up then we have our answer.
That trick won't work under any self-respecting 'nix clone. Unix based systems have a virtual interface that gets configured with 127.0.0.1/8, and doesn't care about the state of our physical adapters. The reason that works at all under Windows is because Windows doesn't actually have a loopback interface device driver. (okay, technically there is one, but it's not installed by default.) Instead, there's some special casing in the IP stack that makes it consider 127.0.0.1 a hidden, non-removable IP alias on each regular network interface. As a side note, if you're on the same local network as the victime, you can often leverage this gross hack to bypass Windows firewall rules by sending it packets with the correct destination MAC address and an IP address of 127.0.0.1. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Senior Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC