route (is it forwarding packets?) (sorry if duplicate).

[William Hooper]

Scot L. Harris said:
[snip]
>
> One machine with a modem?  How is that going to work?

Let me rephrase.  Only one machine on the network having a modem.  If you
only want to use the Internet on one machine you probably don't have a
router, but might have other machines, printers, etc. that need zeroconf.

> Has anybody actually used it?

I just saw a post in HP's forums asking what Jet Direct devices are
compatible.  I think you will find a lot of small Apple networks relying
on it.

> I think at the very least it is something
> that should be disabled if you have other IP addresses configured or better
> yet, disabled until it is explicitly enabled.

The goal of zeroconf is to have... well zero configuration.  Having it
enabled by default means it is available by default without any
configuration.

> I need to find time to run
> some tests but I am wondering if someone could use those addresses to
> access systems on an existing network and if so does it provide a way for
> someone to evade various IDS's?

I think if your firewall is allowing connections you don't want you have
bigger problems.

Nothing about zeroconf changes the basic TCP/IP.  Again, to paraphrase
http://www.zeroconf.org/, it just:

a) finds an unused address
b) allows you to do name resolution without a specific DNS server
c) find out what other services are available.

It's basically a better engineered version of Netbios over TCP/IP.

-- 
William Hooper