Re: [2.4 PATCH] bugfix: ARP respond on all devices

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <20030819112912.359eaea6.davem@redhat.com>,
David S. Miller <davem@redhat.com> wrote:
| On 19 Aug 2003 14:30:26 -0400
| Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@fprintf.net> wrote:
| 
| > If you are not on a shared lan, then it will *ONLY* work if linux is
| > on the other end.  No other system will work.
| 
| And these other systems are broken.  (actually, older Cisco equipment
| correctly responds to the ARP regardless of source IP)
| 
| Just because some Cisco engineer says that it is correct doesn't
| make it is.

What you say is true, but in the real world being able to work with the
most commonly used network hardware is a hard requirement. When
"conforms to RFC" colides with "works" there's an issue, particularly
when the RFC allows several behaviours (bad RFC!).

I would hope that it is possible to get a single flag to force all
packets out of a NIC configured with the source IP in the packet, I
don't feel the need to make that the default behaviour, just to find
some alternative to patches or source routing.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.