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

Patrick Geoffray patrick at myri.com
Mon Jul 12 21:25:16 PDT 2010


Rahul,

On 7/13/2010 12:04 AM, Rahul Nabar wrote:
> I am puzzled by a bunch of ARP requests on my network that I captured
> using tcpdump. Shouldn't ARP discovery requests always be sent to a
> broadcast address?

No, the kernel regularly refreshes the entries in the ARP cache with 
unicast requests. If that fails, then it sends the expensive broadcasts.

Patrick



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