raj@hpindwa.HP.COM (Rick Jones) (10/03/90)
Something from the realm of the arcane perhaps? Consider a pair of boxes acting as brouters (Hybridge? - i'm weak on the terminaology). They do their thing, and get hosts on either side to associate IP addresses with the brouter station addresses. All is good. Now, let's say that one system wants to update/age its ARP cache, and likes to do this with a *unicast* ARP because she doesn't want to disturb everyone on the net just because her cache is old. An ARP request for a remote IP address will appear at the 'local' half of the brouter. What happens next? a) the local half ignores the unicast ARP b) the local half answers on behalf of the remote system c) the local half passes it to the remote system (changing it as needed) d) none of the above I would hope that the answer is either a or c because the router itself does not know that the remote host is really there anymore... ...also, if you know the answer for any of the other box vendors, I would be interested in that too. rick ___ _ ___ |__) /_\ | Richard Anders Jones | MPE/XL Networking Engineer | \_/ \_/ Hewlett-Packard Co. | No, Virginia, that's not a joke. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Being an employee of a Standards Company, all Standard Disclaimers Apply