Wouldn't 'safe' imply no damage could be done? Or better yet, not cause
throughput problems? At one time HP's were in danger of crashing when sent a
huge packet, which is an option on the ping line. Or slow down your network
by sending a bunch of large ping packets. But I agree that ping with only a
IP address or host name is pretty harmless, you just have to watch out for
those commandline options. Similar to ODBC to a database. Some person (is
that right? neither a male nor a female) sooner or later always tries to do
a fetch of a large data set to his computer.

James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Donna Garverick
> Sent: Monday, May 15, 2000 12:34 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: ping
>
>
> "Simonsen, Larry" wrote:
>
> > but this also requires NA capability.  why can not a less
> powered user ping
> > another machine?
>
> perhaps someone from hp would comment about why ping requires
> 'na' capability?
> from my perspective it's a 'safe' command -- all by itself.  while having
> access restricted for nettool is appropriate, is it also necessary for
> ping?                 - d
>
> --
> Donna Garverick     Sr. System Programmer
> 925-210-6631        [log in to unmask]
>
> >>>MY opinions, not Longs Drug Stores'<<<
>