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Date:      Thu, 2 Jan 2003 15:17:06 +0100
From:      Yann GROSSEL <y.grossel@hexanet.fr>
To:        "Bill Moran" <bill_moran2@hotmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: promiscuous mode / strange ethernet packets duplication problem
Message-ID:  <20030102151706.459fc2fc.y.grossel@hexanet.fr>
In-Reply-To: <F104YTxHwMQFLcVcvIh0001dacb@hotmail.com>
References:  <F104YTxHwMQFLcVcvIh0001dacb@hotmail.com>

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On Thu, 02 Jan 2003 08:56:42 -0500
"Bill Moran" <bill_moran2@hotmail.com> wrote:

> There's your answer.  Any machine with forwarding turned on will resend
> a packet that isn't destin for it.  That's by design.
> It doesn't make much sense to me that you'd have a lot of machines with
> forwarding turned on.  Usually only gateways use this.  Honestly, I
> can't thing of any reason to have forwarding on if your machine only
> has 1 IP address.
> 
> >As several boxes have this problem, they resend packets to each others
> >very quickly, generating a flood on the network. This flood only stop
> >when all TTL of packets reach 0 or when the switch finally re-learn
> >on what port is located the interface with the target MAC address.
> >
> >Does anybody have any clue about what this kind of problem may be ?
> 
> Turn forwarding of on all but your gateways.

Mhhh.

Gateways are designed to forward packets from network to network. If a
machine wants to send a packet to a remote network, it will send that
packet to the gateway by putting the gateway interface MAC address in the
destination field of the ethernet packet. The gateway will know that it
must forward the packet because of that. And it will know where to forward
the packet by looking to the destination IP address field of the packet.

Here the machines are "forwarding" ethernet packets with a destination
MAC address field set to ANOTHER machine of our network. In other words,
these packets are NOT targetted to the "gateways", neither from their
MAC address destination field nor from their IP address destination field.

So why are these packets "forwarded" ?

Regards

Yann

-- 
Yann GROSSEL                      Email: y.grossel@hexanet.fr
HEXANET NOC                       URL: http://www.hexanet.fr/
Tel: +33 (0)3 26 79 30 05         Fax: +33 (0)3 26 79 30 06

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