I once took down a whole university campus lan doing this oops
sudo ping -f 192.168.1.255
This is a wonderfully antisocial little experiment that fires ICMP echo requests at my broadcast address as fast as the kernel can manage, essentially shouting “anyone alive?” to the entire LAN over and over again.
On a modern network, most machines sensibly ignore it, but anything old-school, misconfigured, or intentionally permissive may answer back, and if several do, you briefly get a taste of the kind of packet chaos that made 1990s network admins lose sleep.
It’s fun and cool because it turns a single command into a stress test, a history lesson, and a truth serum all at once: you learn which devices are well behaved, which ones still think it’s 1988, and whether your own network stack or emulator can survive being yelled at relentlessly without falling over.
Why? I'm testing a DEQNA emulator that I'm writing for the PDP-11, and need a stress test before I check in!