Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! > Udo, > I wasn't referring to modems negotiating speed and > protocol on a new connection, but the routing of data > packets across the 'net. Routers use a timed update > of all available routers and keep this info in their > routing tables. > Rob Are you saying that the routers ignore IP addresses completely? Well, that would be a wonderful thing, and most certainly the solution to the problem with scarce addresses in an IPV4 network! ;-) So tell me, how do the routers react if a packet is sent back to the forged address? Do they really know where to send it even though the address says that it belongs to the Asian region? ;-D Mind that we are not talking about gateways to an isolated net here, which are also commonly referred to as "routers", and which regularly do NAT, but about servers whose sole purpose is to route the packets to their destination in as few "hops" as possible. Would they really send the packet to the router that the forged address came from even though it does not match the corresponding sub net mask? About the only purpose of the sub net mask is to make the routing of packets to the right sub net easier, and you just say the Internet routers ignore it? I can't believe this. Regards, Udo -- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de -- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --