From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Subject: Re: Fw: [Bugme-new] [Bug 3657] New: downed interfaces acting as aliases Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:06:51 -0700 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <20041029000651.6fd7360f.davem@davemloft.net> References: <20041028234649.2d4ed3b8.akpm@osdl.org> <20041028234502.203b42c3.davem@davemloft.net> <4181ED02.1060501@candelatech.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: akpm@osdl.org, netdev@oss.sgi.com, mbm@alt.org Return-path: To: Ben Greear In-Reply-To: <4181ED02.1060501@candelatech.com> Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:10:58 -0700 Ben Greear wrote: > Why would you want this behaviour? If it's configured down, it would > seem that the user is trying to tell the system not to use it :) Because IP addresses are assosciated with the host, not a specific interface or link. That is the model that we've implemented since day one. According to the RFCs, this is one of several valid models. People hate it that when there's a decision of whether to reply to something or not, we do whatever we can to reply to packets we receive if we can find a way to do so. This approache increases the likelyhood that two hosts can communicate successfully. I need not remind people about how much people dislike our default ARP behavior :-) but it is done that way for the same reason.