I like seeing LWN writers pick up small patches and explain what they are why they are important. As a developer, often the impact of a change is not obvious and without further explanation significant changes go unnoticed. The recent story about Generalized TTL Security Measures in lwn.net is one such example.
But, when a story comes out, the writer should do research on the background. First, it is nice to give some credit to the author :-) and Vyatta, as well as also some history. I did this patch based on an enhancement request for the current Vyatta version. The starting point was a (unaccepted) patch to Quagga, and existing implementation for FreeBSD systems. It was one of those patches where the kernel change took less time than writing the test programs.
Also, the initial patch wasn't perfect since (nothing ever is), since it broke time wait sockets, and missed the case of ICMP messages. Both should be fixed by the time 2.6.34-rc2 comes out. Also, the necessary support has not been integrated into upstream Quagga (yet).
I appreciate the review and feedback from Eric, Andi, David, and Pekka for making this work.
