Joe,

On Dec 3, 2013, at 7:54 AM, Joe Touch <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 12/3/2013 12:55 AM, Pedro Roque Marques wrote:
>> Is the fundamental IP behavior that you are referring to the TTL decrement 
>> between two addresses on the same "subnet" ?
>> I believe you are wrong: to my knowledge proxy ARP is compliant with Host 
>> and Router requirement RFCs.
> 
> For IPv4, RFC1812 says that all 1's "limited broadcast"
> (255.255.255.255) MUST NOT be forwarded. RFC2644 updates that RFC to say
> that even subnet-directed broadcasts MUST NOT be forwarded (as
> configured by default).
> 
> So by default, a router would never forward the broadcast for which the
> proxy ARP would be an appropriate response.

yes.

> Which would mean that the
> proxy would work only if already populated at the router;

I don't follow. Lets assume i've a device that is an IP compliant router which 
has interface A and interface B.
The quote above means that it should not forward a packet address to 
255.255.255.255 between link A and link B (or vice-versa). This has nothing no 
relationship to whether this device is capable of generating ARP requests or 
proxy ARP replies.

> there would be
> no means to forward the initial request if the cache were empty. So
> proxy ARP would work if manually configured, but would be unreliable if
> automatically populated if used on a router that spans two groups of
> hosts on the same subnet.

Proxy ARP is unrelated to subnet broadcasts.

> 
> Joe
> 

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