[Techtalk] ARP traffic

[Subba Rao]

On  0, Jeff Dike <jdike at karaya.com> wrote:
> subba9 at home.com said:
> > It looks like there is a lot of ARP traffic on the Internet again. We
> > have seen it gradually subside after the CodeRed worm. Does anyone
> > have any idea why this increase in ARP traffic?
> 
> ARP, as in Address Resolution Protocol?  I thought that was purely an ethernet
> (or at least LAN) protocol, and it didn't go out over the Internet at large.
> 
> I know from painful experience that it doesn't willingly cross ethernet 
> segments.
> 

When the address is not found, the local gateway sends probes to the neighboring
gateways to resolve the address. Every machine upon boot up sends a ARP
broadcast to let everyone on the segment know of it's presence. When machines
outside the network want to find you, they send an ARP request.

-- 

Subba Rao
subba9 at home.com                     http://members.home.net/subba9/
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