Way back in the day the ‘ping of death‘ ( # ) provided plenty of fun by annoying co-workers. Killing a Windows box on the office network was insanely simple:
ping -l 65510 target.ip.address
We eventually had to come to a truce in order to get any work done.
What I don’t recall ever hearing about is the origin of how the ‘ping of death’ was discovered. The history is noted by Larry Osterman back in 2007, who apparently is the one who discovered the problem:
I quickly realized that my test application was the cause of the crash, and I isolated my machines from the network and started digging in. I quickly root caused the problem – the broadcast that was sent by my test application was malformed and it exposed a bug in the bowser.sys driver. When the bowser received this packet, it crashed.
But that isn’t even the best part. Because Microsoft wasn’t yet on a switched network, it wasn’t just his Windows NT system that crashed:
At this point, everyone in the offices around me started to get noisy – there was a great deal of cursing going on. What I’d not realized was that every machine had crashed at the same time as my dev machine had crashed. And I do mean EVERY machine. Every single machine in the corporation running Windows NT had crashed. Twice (after allowing just enough time between crashes to allow people to start getting back to work).
The icing on the cake for this story is that Larry then went around and apologized to everyone who got hit by this.