Jump to content

Discard Protocol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 72.199.177.46 (talk) at 02:01, 25 July 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Internet protocol suite
Application layer
Transport layer
Internet layer
Link layer
This article is about the Internet protocol name DISCARD. For a definition of the term "discard", see the Wiktionary entry discard.

The DISCARD protocol is an internet protocol defined in RFC 863. It is intended for testing and measurement purposes.

A host may send data to a host that supports the DISCARD protocol, on either TCP or UDP port 9. Everything sent to the server is thrown away. No response gfdgdfgdgdgdfgis sent back.

Current testing and measurement of IP networks is more commonly done with ping and traceroute computer network tools which use the ICMP protocol instead of DISCARD.

Inetd implementation of DISCARD

On Linux, FreeBSD, and other UNIX-like operating systems a discard server is built into the inetd daemon. The discard service is usually not enabled by default. It may be enabled by adding the following lines to the file /etc/inetd.conf and telling inetd to reload its configuration: 

discard   stream  tcp     nowait  root    internal
discard   dgram   udp     wait    root    internal

See also

  • RFC 348, The Discard process.
  • RFC 863, The Discard protocol.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discard_Protocol&oldid=146899174"