Re: Recording slow scans

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Marcus J. Ranum, sie wrote:
[...]
> I find it amusing that you're having this discussion with Darren,
> who also has done considerable good work in the community by
> making ip_filt available. I don't know if his experience matches
> mine, but I doubt he's gotten a whole lot of "pitching in" from
> all over the 'net. Tell me Darren, what's the whine-to-help
> ratio on ip_filt? For the fwtk, I'd put it at 100:1 and for
> NFR it's closer to 2000:1.

My experience is somewhat similar to yours, it seems.  There are
occasionally people who will contribute back patches for which I am
always grateful, especially when it comes to porting to OS's (such
as IRIX or releases for which I don't yet have).  More often than
not, those patches are just people cleaning up after me because I
work on it out of hours (i.e. usually 9pm-1am type thing) and don't
have the time to do as much testing as I really should.  All of the
"biggies" I've done/initiated myself.  From a numerical statistical
point of view, with over 600 users on the mailling list for it, I
have received patches from maybe 5% of that number.

I'm not sure how many people whine, I have the same policy that was
laid down for FWTK (you should know what you're doing with it before
you use it), and unless someone has already made significant progress
and have run into a real problem, I often delete whines without
prejudice - I've got better things to do with my time.  The ratio might
even be as high as 20:1 for IP Filter :)

Darren