Re: [dhcwg] ARP reply vs. ARP request to announce address acquired from DHCP

On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Ted Lemon wrote:

> BPF wasn't passing arp-reply packets at the time.   Perhaps it does
> now, or perhaps it's handled differently in lpf.   I thought it was
> rather odd at the time, but at the time fixing it wasn't my main
> priority, so I didn't look any further.

Might be that you filtered out ARP by only allowing UDP. Just a
thought.

> So the question is, what does this tell us?

It tells us that we can do either ARP replies or requests in our
UNIX dhcp clients and any UNIX-like operating systems (Mac OS
X). There's nothing in RFC 2131 which says "don't send an ARP
request." It just says:

"The client SHOULD broadcast an ARP reply to announce the client's
new IP address and clear any outdated ARP cache entries in hosts
on the client's subnet."

No need to update the RFC for this. Just send an ARP reply from
the client and let the OS send all the requests it wants :-)

-- 
Thamer Al-Harbash            http://www.whitefang.com/
          team dresch made me do it
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