On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 02:55:32PM -0400, Jim wrote:
> This is a very good explanation, however I have this identical scenario
> with one of my co-los.  I have gone round and round with the administrator
> for over a year now with no solution.
> 
> You make the statement below that these two machines can't communicate,
> however I can ping and tracroute the offending machines, and they can do
> the same in reverse.  On traceroute, the traffic definitely travels
> through the router as it should, but I still see these out of network ARP
> requests.
> 
> I know I'm confused :(

Actually, the communications can work depending on the situation. You
can get some asymetric routing going where the machine with the
smaller netmask is bouncing everything through a router and the other
machine is talking back directly. The router is often, but not always,
going to be generating ICMP redirects in such a scenario. They are
another marker for this kind of misconfiguration.

In your example, make sure to not only run traceroute(8), but run a
tcpdump(8) too with the '-e' option. Check the MACs to see if the
responses are _really_ coming back through the router. Remember, a
traceroute(8) shows you the route packets take to get to a remote
host. It tells you nothing about the route they take back.

> > [Inappropriate cross-post to -stable removed.]
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 02:08:51PM -0500, Chris Byrnes wrote:
> >> My /var/log/messages is being filled, non-stop, by these errors
> >> looped:
> >>
> >> Sep 15 13:41:28 servername /kernel: arplookup xx.xxx.xx.xxx failed:
> >> host is  not on local network
> >> Sep 15 13:41:28 servername /kernel: arplookup xx.xxx.xx.xxx failed:
> >> host is  not on local network
> >>
> >> After doing some reading, I've already issued, "sysctl -w
> >> net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_wrong_iface=0" thinking that would fix the
> >>  problem.  Unfortunately, it has not.
> >>
> >> Any ideas?
> >
> > This is a netmask problem, but not really the one that other people have
> > described. This is how it usually works. Your troubled machine above,
> > "servername," receives an ARP who-has from another machine on the LAN
> > called "clientname." However, the IP address that clientname gives as a
> > source does not match up to any local networks that
> > servername knows about.
> >
> > For example, say servername has an address of 192.0.2.10/25. The other
> > machine has 192.0.2.210/24. When servername gets an ARP (which is
> > broadcast so servername gets it fine),
> >
> >   who-has 192.0.2.10 tell 192.0.2.210
> >
> > It gets confused. 192.0.2.210 is not local (as far as it is concerned)
> > so it logs an error.
> >
> > Note that this is not a harmless error. These two machine cannot talk to
> > each other.
> >
> > The fix, of course, is to make sure all machines on the same LAN have
> > the same netmask.
> > --
> > Crist J. Clark                     |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >                                    |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/    |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
> 
> 

-- 
Crist J. Clark                     |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
                                   |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/    |     [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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