Dear World, ping is a very useful command. It lets me see if a host is up. If you block ICMP ECHO/REPLY then I instead have to play the "Guess what service might be listening" game. Or I assume your machine is down and might worry (because I care). So please don't do it. I really don't see what you're trying to gain; it strikes me as firewalling without actually thinking about it. Are you by chance ignoring things like destination unreachable as well? And breaking PMTU discovery? Well done you.

From an ubuntu-announce mail just received:

• A slim default installation, occupying just 400 megabytes

Now I'm not picking on Ubuntu in particular here, but the word just really does seem to indicate that Tom Womack's proclamation that "Disk space is cheap" just continues to get truer and truer. My first well used Linux install was on a 40MB disk and I'm prepared to bet there are plenty of people who started with less. Even these days people like OpenWRT are producing distros that fit in 8MB of flash. I think it's a sad reflection that 400MB is considered a small footprint for a mainstream distro.