So. I have already a few times faced this problem but newer got the solution. I'd like to know what does it depend on and who hould it be fixed. The thing is that I'm getting error messages like: "80.186.10.1 sent an invalid ICMP error to a broadcast." I don't know whose address is this 80.186.10.1, but one thing I know for sure is that my interner provider offers me five dynamic ip addresses which start with the same values, that will say 80.186... Once I got this after I installed samba on my home network. I didn't get rid of it, until I didn't need samba anymore and uninstalled it. Then every linux powered pc had those error messages. But now it's only my laptop. Samba isn't installed so it can't be the reason. That laptop is the only computer in my 100/10Mbps local area network which has a 10Mbps NIC, could it depend on something like this? Please, any advice is warmly welcome. I'm getting sick of those interrupting error messages while doing something in console. In case this isn't anything abnormal, then how could I divert the output to /dev/null, or something similar?

Best regards Otto

Open /etc/syslog.conf and comment out everything with /dev/console. You don't block the pckaets this way, but the error messages won't be shown on your console.

Do you have a firewall? I think it'd be a good idea to use it to block incorrect ICMP packets.

I do not have a firewall. But that helped already a lot, I won't be interrupted all the time anymore. I've been thinking of getting/setting up a firewall, but in case those icmp messages are just ignored so I guess they wont do harm.

Regards Otto