Subject: WG Action - 1 week to discuss [LL7] How do existing hosts respond to broadcast requests?

From: Erik Guttman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 13:55:29 +0100 (CET)

The following issue will be discussed for the week ending March 6, 2003.
Please send comments to the mailing list during the last call period.

This issue is described at http://www.spybeam.org/ll7.html and
reproduced here for the record:

(Steve:  Please look over the proposed solution and make sure that your
concern is addressed.)

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Description of Issue  How do existing hosts respond to broadcast
requests?    
Submitter Name  Steve Bellovin    
Submitter Email Address [email-masked]    
Date first submitted  6 Feb 03    
Reference
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/zeroconf/2002-10/msg00000.html
Comment Type ['T'echnical | 'E'ditorial]  T    
Priority ['S' Must fix | '1' Should fix | '2' May fix ]  S    
Section 2.5
Rationale/Explanation of issue: 
Broadcast arp replies - is this commonly done? How do hosts behave?
Lengthy description of problem: 

Steve Bellovin wrote:
How do current hosts behave with respect to this:

All ARP packets (*replies* as well as requests) that contain a
link-local 'sender IP address' MUST be sent using link-level
broadcast instead of link-level unicast. This aids timely
detection of duplicate addresses. An example illustrating how this
helps is given in Section 4.

(I understand the necessity, but is it done? I suspect not. This
suggests that there be a warning that link-local addresses SHOULD NOT
be manually configured.)

Stuart Cheshire replied:
No change is required because this is already answered by the document:

Section 1.4

Note that addresses in the 169.254/16 prefix SHOULD NOT be configured
manually

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Requested Change:
No change.