[Beowulf] Network problem: Why are ARP discovery requests sent to specific addresses instead of a broadcast domain

[Beat Rubischon]

Hello!

Quoting <rpnabar at gmail.com> (13.07.10 22:32):

> It is curious that most of my gratuitous ARP is coming
> from my IPMI interface and not my main eth stack. Not sure why. Maybe
> the Dell IPMI just is more aggressive about it.

This behavour could be controlled by some flags in the BMC:

# ipmitool lan set 1 arp respond on
# ipmitool lan set 1 arp generate on

I had BMCs where gratuitous ARP was needed as the standard ARP responses
were not working. To minimize the impact of the broadcasts I expanded the
delay between those packages up to 127 seconds.

Beat

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