Hello, We know that changes in MAC addresses are not frequent but we are working on a special, highly advanced networking Linux based project in our LABs, where we do change MAC addresses of an interface quite frequently. (We do not go totally wild; the MAC addresses we are changing into are from a set of given MAC addresses).
Normally, when we change a MAC address of some interface, the relevant neighbours in the LAN which have entries with the previous MAC address are not sent any update notification; instead, it is there regular timers mechanisms which update the MAC address to the new one in their ARP tables. I had written a small patch to neigh_changeaddr() in net/core/neighbour.c against the 2.6 git net tree, which sends a gratuitous ARP to update the list of all the involved neighbours with the change of MAC address. The patch is for neigh_changeaddr() only. This patch was tested and it does work in my LAB; if such a patch is not needed, I wonder why ? It seems to me that it could not cause any troubles. BTW, I had noticed that in irlan driver, there is such a mechanism of sending a gratuitous ARP to update all the neighbours when a MAC address is changed. Signed-off-by: David Shwatrz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- 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
