system-config-network & Zeroconf

John W. Linville linville at redhat.com
Thu Mar 13 17:38:01 UTC 2008


On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 08:44:35AM +0100, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:53:04 -0500, Michael E Brown wrote:
> 
> > This is a really evil thing to do. I once had somebody misconfigure a
> > netmask on one of the dell.com inbound mail servers to 0.0.0.0, which
> > is effectively the same thing. Nobody could figure out why it had all
> > sorts of wierd errors but overall network connectivity looked like it
> > worked fine.
> 
> Yes, using proxy arp is definitely not covered under best network practices.
> As is routing by ICMP redirect. Best to avoid both if possible.

I really don't think it is correct to characterize setting a netmask
to 0.0.0.0 to be the same thing as proxy ARP.  One effects when you
generate ARP requests, the other effects when you respond to them.

Doing "route add default gw eth0" on the clients is similar to
setting the nemask to 0.0.0.0, so perhaps this is what Michael Brown
was suggesting is similar.  Still, the number of individual hosts
connecting to Dell's mail server is probably gigantic compared to
the number of individual sites you'll see when sharing your wifi
connection.  So, I don't think this is a major negative of this
technique for the problem set in question.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com




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