From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 2 6:17:15 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6BA7237B401 for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 06:17:13 -0800 (PST) Received: from snowflake.hexanet.fr (snowflake.hexanet.fr [81.23.32.32]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A020E43E4A for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 06:17:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from y.grossel@hexanet.fr) Received: from snowflake (snowflake [127.0.0.1]) by snowflake.hexanet.fr (Postfix) with SMTP id 7064B11E9; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 15:17:06 +0100 (CET) Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 15:17:06 +0100 From: Yann GROSSEL To: "Bill Moran" 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: References: Organization: Hexanet X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.8 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-debian-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 02 Jan 2003 08:56:42 -0500 "Bill Moran" 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message