strange messages on my consoles
 

Hello,
I get strange messages on all the consoles all the time. They look like this:

var/log/messages is also full of these messages.

All I understand is, that it has to do with my ethernet card, which is working fine, as far as I can see.
Does anybody know how to fix this problem or at least how to stop the consoles from printing these messages?

Thanks a lot,
atzalan
--
Athlon 1800, Debian Sarge

They are most likely dropped packets from some rogue computer sending out pings to try to find a system to infect. I get them very often, with activity varying from almost all day to several days without any. My firewall is set to not acknowledge or accept any outside request. But they get logged because they come as far as the firewall.

I don't know how to stop them appearing on your console; they don't appear except in my logs. But you can run a "whois" and find out where some of them are coming from. Not that that does much good--millions of personal (and business) computers the world over are infected and doing this because their owners are either too unconcerned or too ignorant to clean them up and tighten security.

You can run the program "ethereal" and get information in overwhelming detail about all the network traffic, if you wish. In some cases it might be useful. I thought I was being attacked once without letup for at least 48 hours. I ran ethereal and found out that I myself had let a ping keep going for all that time--I forgot to stop it. I didn't feel too good about that.