I remember reading that Amazon review of "The Story About Ping" shortly after it was published. Still a classic to this day. Excerpt: ...The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.
I still laugh reading it--truly satire at its finest.
Sorry, I meant "shortly after the review was published," not the book. In fact "The Story About Ping" was a favorite children's book of mine when I was young (in the '70s) and I still have that copy.
One thing I never knew about ping is that if you ping a broadcast address, then all hosts will respond! But for some operating systems (windows I think?), you need a packet capture to see this. It's been useful when probing around unknown networks.
I only found that out by reading the source code. It was part of a short-lived attempt to become a better hacker by familiarizing myself with the Linux source code, kernel and all. The more I learn, the more impossible it seems to ever master it all...
At one of my first corporate jobs about 20 years ago, I noticed that "nslookup x.y.z.255" actually resolved to a host. I tried to ping it, but got nothing...until I got a phone call from security about why a malicious broadcast ping came from my desktop machine.
I still laugh reading it--truly satire at its finest.