Re: ARP responses broken!

[Eric Weigle]

> oh great, now I wont be able to upgrade our kernels to 2.4 unless I find a
> utility to filter out the ARP requests?
"There's more than one way to do it" (see below)

> Why was this ability removed?
Apparently the decision was made to do it this way because it simplified the
fast path of the code; but I could be wrong. I have yet to achieve Linux Guru
status, right now I'm just some guy who has hit this problem and knows the
work-arounds.

> If I screw up and put it on the wrong card, I WANT the system to stop
> working...
I agree. I'm not making an argument for this implementation. Well, maybe I am;
Linux is intended as a desktop operating system and in that context most people
would rather have the failsafe than the failstop. Perhaps this method is
`inelegant' but it kept up a cluster of machines we have here a lot longer than
they might otherwise have functioned (the gige Acenic driver had some problems a
while back and about half the cards silently failed-- the 'broken' arp responses
meant that we could still talk to those boxes without reconfiguring IPs).

Anyway, Here's links to a discussion that occurred this January.

If you require the 'hidden' functionality, the first message cites the following
links; the patch apparently works with 2.4.x with some tweaking.
    http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/arp.html
    http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/hidden-2.3.41-1.diff

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0014.html
    http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0020.html
    http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0188.html
    http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0213.html
    http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0220.html
    http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0268.html
        http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0334.html
            http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/0410.html

Hope that helps
-Eric

--------------------------------------------
 Eric H. Weigle   CCS-1, RADIANT team
 [e-mail]     Los Alamos National Lab
 [phone]   http://home.lanl.gov/ehw/
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