--- Vishwas Raman <vishwas@eternal-systems.com> wrote: > After Machine 2 takes over Machine 2's IP, > all it needs to do is to send a ping to all the > clients of Machine 1, which is Machine 3 > in this case. According to the ARP RFC, Machine 3 > at that point has to flush its arp cache, and then > register a new entry MIP1:MMAC2 in its arp > cache. I even tested this by using the arp, ifconfig > and ping commands and it works. If I understand it right, the ARP RFC does not say that an ICMP packet should be received for the ARP cache to be updated. Even if an ARP request is received, the ARP cache should be updated with the sender's address. And you could even send an ARP reply, without getting a request, to update other hosts' cache. This is called gratuitous ARP. I am not sure if Linux ARP implementation updates the cache when it receives gratuitous ARP packet. -Ravi. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
