firewall and ddos questions...

Okay, first my dumb question, what are the differences and similarities between ping -f and denial of service attacks?. Second question: If they are the same, shouldnt my firewall (outpost) block the attacks? The reason I ask is this, a couple days ago, I decided to test my firewall myself, so I set two of the computers on my lan to ping -f my workstation that connects it to the internet. Outpost completely locked up, and I had to close it in task manager. Could this be used against myself and other outpost users to cicumvent the firewall?

Allrighty. DoS attacks, are attacks that are meant to deny use of a computer to other users. Pinging can be a type of attack, but not the only way. And outpost may help keep your computer from being overwhelmed, but it will not protect you from a DoS attack because DoS attacks will take up all your bandwidth. So while outpost will keep you from replying to those packets, you will be unable to use your connection because you are being clogged.

EDIT:
Read this http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=230913 the first post, though it is hidden, contains nothing bad. Your outpost most likely locked up on you because it ran out of resources, or could not keep up with the amount of requests it was getting, if you have a faster, or more powerful system, it would most likely not have crashed. I was once DDoS'd when I was using zonealarm, my h/d started whirring like crazy, and my internet connection pretty much went dead. I was wondering what was going on, I checked and saw ZaPro getting pings, and then when I tried to exit, it crashed on me. BSOD.

What if you disable ping reply in zonealarm, I got my friend to ping me and it just came up host not found, because zonealarm stopped it, would your bandwidth still slow down?

By default all firewalls, (all that I know of at least) do not reply to pings, but it would still hog up the bandwidth, unless you have split upload and download speeds, then you can still upload, but can not download.

it's normal that outpost completely locks up. under a DoS-attack the application has so much to do to block the ICMP-packages (ping), that it can't answer the requests made by the OS. so in the taskmanager you will see it marked as a locked up programm!!

khakisrule > thanks for the help. Well resources shoulnt have been a problem, the computer in question has 2 1.5 Ghz processors, and 1gb of ram, cause its what I do my graphic work on. Oh well, I dont really expect to be hit with any DoS attacks, but its still nice to know about it just in case.

Keep in mind that someone can ddos you alot faster on a lan than they can over the internet.