Sam / Christian,

This sort of issue is not unheard of in cases where an IP address moves
from interface to interface, or between hosts.  Most situations that
expect this type of issue (e.g., bonding link failover) already issue
gratuitous ARPs in order to update L2 peers.

I think the bottom line here is that dhclient (the DHCP client typically
used on Ubuntu, and presumably the one in use here) does not implement
RFC 5227, "IPv4 Address Conflict Detection," which describes how
gratutious ARPs must be done if the host provides that functionality
(5227 2.3, "Announcing an Address").

Most network configuration tools (and the kernel itself) on linux do not
issue gratuitous ARPs by default at address assignment time, so this
lack isn't especially unusual.  E.g., there is no option in
/etc/network/interfaces to instruct ifup to issue a GARP.

I'll note that 5227 is a proposed standard, and, as such, hosts are not
required to implement it, so dhclient is not violating any standards by
not issuing gratuitous ARPs.


Now, none of the above actually resolves the problem here, it just
explains that you've landed in a corner case that doesn't come up very
often.

As far as resolving this, one obvious possibility is to add RFC 5227
functionality to dhclient through its dhclient-script facility (and in
fact the man page for that is close to suggesting that: for the BOUND
case, the script should "somehow" perform duplicate address detection
via ARP).

I'm not too familiar with cloud-init's internals, but for 5227
compliance, the GARP would be issued on every boot, and cloud-init only
runs on first boot, so an implementation within cloud-init would likely
be setting up some persistent configuration.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1677668

Title:
  no GARPs during ephemeral boot

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