Bug in ARP requests

[Motonori Shindo]

Hi,

From: Andre Oppermann <oppermann at pipeline.ch>
Subject: Bug in ARP requests
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 15:33:21 +0200

> I got hit by this pretty hard when I connected a FreeBSD/Zebra box
> to AMSIX. Appearently the Cisco and Juniper boxes don't answer to
> broken ARP requests if the target hardware address field is not set
> to NULL but filled with random memory junk. While debugging this we
> got really confused by the tcpdumps... Ethereal saved the day because
> it has a much nicer display than tcpdump.

I also came accross this problem when I was testing the equipment
(wireless access point, in fact) made by the company I currently work
for. At that time, I thought that it was specific my company's
equipment, but now I'm amezed to know that there are so many
networking equipments that don't accept such a bogus ARP Request.

BTW, tcpdump prints out the target hardware address in ARP Request if
it isn't all zero and that made me realized that the problem was
caused by FreeBSD's ARP request. tcpdump saved a day for me:-)