Good to see you took the initative Para, i was thinking along the same lines. Though I do have a small segment to add to your post.

In the recent days, a severe exploit was found concerning a company (Cisco Systems) routers. This exploit was labeled "Code Brown" (Highest security alert by Cisco's standards. What the exploit entails is that a user, with enough know-how, can malform a packet (bit of data), send it to a router, and crash it at will. Well, thats bad enough in itself, but the fact is the majority of the Internet (Main network frameworks, HUBs, DNS, etc) are all using Cisco Equiptment. Basically, a user can take out (almsot any) cisco router at will with one packet.

Now, this thread being connection related--you might have already concluded this, but that would mean you get disconnected from the destination your connected to if the router in the middle was shutdown.

Well, the good news is a patch was released Friday (June18, 2003) that will fix the router. All cisco routers that predate IOS version 12.3 must be patched. Though a patch has been released, not all companies have put their network administrators to good use *sigh*. The patch (I can only assume) should cover the majority of network HUBs by Monday afternoon (would be my guess).

Again, just a tidbit I wanted to point out, so if your disconnected, or notice your own network recently netsplitting often, this may be a benefactor. wink


-KingTomato