Re: [dhcwg] Gratuitous ARP in DHCP vs. IPv4 ACD Draft

>"Ongoing conflict detection and defense" appears an unnecessary
>overhead unless hosts make up addresses rather than relying on
>a simple allocator such as DHCP to assign them. It would have
>been easy enough to define an initial election mechanism for 
>which host on a subnet, lacking a DHCP server, should provide
>simple address allocation. The result would be a tiny amount
>of extra work for one host instead of all the "ongoing conflict 
>detection and defense" for all hosts.

I really don't know what overhead you're talking about.

There are no extra packets to do ongoing conflict detection (and no 
change to existing packets). If you mean CPU overhead, there really isn't 
any, because this is just a tiny refinement to the existing code path for 
handling received ARP packets. All the draft says is that if you see 
someone else broadcast an ARP packet, and when you go to update your ARP 
cache you find that it's YOUR OWN IP address that you're about to update 
to point to some other machine's hardware address, that's bad news, and 
you probably shouldn't ignore it. That's all: When you observe that the 
network is broken, then you should at least alert the user in some way so 
that they have an idea what is wrong.

Stuart Cheshire <cheshire@apple.com>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer, Inc.
 * www.stuartcheshire.org

_______________________________________________
dhcwg mailing list
dhcwg@ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dhcwg