How much bandwidth would ping flooding consume in a fully switched LAN?

[Quad]

i was thinking about those big gaming lan parties with several hundred people
and there's bound to be a couple of idiot teenagers that try to ping flood the servers, and other clients

so how much bandwidth would this really take up?
i mean, windows ping.exe sends a max size of 65.5kb packets right?
think ping flooding is an issue?

 

[spidey07]

shouldn't be an issue at all. Remember that one machine can only transmit frames at 100 Megabit/sec. The core of the network would be 10s of gigabits/sec.

My devious self would stream an all ones IP broadcast which is also a layer2 broadcast at 100 Megabit/sec. That would bring the whole network to a screaching halt.

 

[pcmark]

If you use ping with extended commands, you can specify larger packet sizes.

 

[n0cmonkey]

smurf

 

[Garion]

In any network, one or two machines could easily overwhelm another, in this case, a server. It really doesn't take all that much, unfortunately. Only way to avoid that would be to run a gig card in the server, and that's not a guarantee, in any case.

I've you've got a spare Linux box around and are worried about it, you could probably run Snort on it and detect anyone trying to nail you. Kind of clunky and would take some tricks on the switch but you could at least see what's going on.

- G

 

[Abzstrak]

in windows I don't know how U could bring it down... in linux it would be trivial with just ping, the flood option, and 64k packets to the broadcast addy.

maybe some firewall software on the server? maybe set it to allow everything except icmp packets, that would at least prevent it from getting slammed.

actually what kinda switch are we talking about here? a POS linksys? or a cisco 6500 series ? I mean U have alot of options with a better (L4 capable) switch...