Hi Rick, On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 10:27:07AM -0800, Rick Jones wrote: > Anand Kumria wrote: > >Hi, > > > >I'm writing a program which receives ARP packets and have noticed that > >broadcast ARP packets seem to come in with the destination hardware > >address set as all zeros. > > long, Long, LONG ago, all-zeros was considered broadcast. however, > long, Long ago, that was switched to all-ones, but all-zeros was > "grandfathered" in this day and age (heck even a decade ago) it is my > understanding that nothing should be continuing to send broadcast as > all-zeros.
Natually as soon as I sent this email, I figured it out (in fact I thought I had caught the email before it was sent out. sigh.). In the ARP packet itself, when a query goes out the requested hardware address is set to all zeros -- according to the RFC this is so (old-style) equipment can just sway the source/target portions of the packet, whack in their hardware address change the type and send it on their merry way. Anyway, thanks for answering; learning is always fun. Just not so publically :-/ Cheers, Anand -- `When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives' -- Robert A Heinlein, "If this goes on --" - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
