martin@sabre.UUCP (martin levy) (02/20/85)
I am looking for some clues as to the usage of ARP requests to deal with routing in IP networks. i have heard about it and would like to hear if anyone can give me some more leads. What ones does is not bother to check if the IP address is on local network and just send out an ARP request anyway. Then the correct gateway will send an ARP responce back. With this scheme there is no need to have routing code in 'workstations', you only need to have in in gateways. any pointers (or code) would be useful. Martin Levy Bellcore. PS. should there be an RFC on this, plase can someone send it.
JNC@MIT-XX.ARPA (J. Noel Chiappa) (02/22/85)
This is the WRONG THING. The Internet Working Group is about to adopt a standard which advises against doing this. The discussion is almost done, and I expect the standard will be out soon. The problem is that ARP was never meant to be a routing protocol, and there are a lot of failure modes that can't be fixed without modifying the ARP spec. If you want more detailed arguments about why this is a complete loss, look at the first chunk of messages in <JNC>SUBNETS.TXT, on MIT-XX. This file can be retrieved with the 'ANONYMOUS' FTP login. Draft RFC's about what you should do are in HOST.DOC in the same place. Any replies to me, personally, please: I am no longer on unix-wizards. Noel -------