Silliest environment variable ever?

It seems that under Solaris 11, if you can’t be bothered to type ’-s’ everytime you want a continuous ping response from a peer, you can instead set the environment variable MACHINE_THAT_GOES_PING to something non-null and voila…. huh?

sol-esx01:~$ ping sol-esx03
sol-esx03 is alive
sol-esx01:~$ 
sol-esx01:~$ export MACHINE_THAT_GOES_PING="true" 
sol-esx01:~$ 
sol-esx01:~$ ping sol-esx03
PING sol-esx03: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from sol-esx03 (192.168.100.6): icmp_seq=0. time=0.552 ms
64 bytes from sol-esx03 (192.168.100.6): icmp_seq=1. time=0.257 ms
64 bytes from sol-esx03 (192.168.100.6): icmp_seq=2. time=0.222 ms
64 bytes from sol-esx03 (192.168.100.6): icmp_seq=3. time=0.246 ms
64 bytes from sol-esx03 (192.168.100.6): icmp_seq=4. time=0.329 ms
^C
----sol-esx03 PING Statistics----
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms)  min/avg/max/stddev = 0.222/0.321/0.552/0.135
sol-esx01:~$ 

Seriously, I really do wonder what the case for implementing this was. I can only imagine this is to make Solaris mimic the behaviour of linux.

Maybe I’m missing something… Please tell me I am.

Paul.

Paul Eggleton : 07 Feb 2011 17:06 |  Tags: 11 Machine That Goes Ping Ping Solaris |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem