Re: Can we make NM automatically handle the need for proxy arp?

["Darren Albers" <dalbers gmail com>]

On 8/27/06, Miles Lane <miles lane gmail com> wrote:
> Firstly, where should this be discussed?  I understand that NM talks
> to dhcdbd, which talks to dhclient.  What component should notice
> the misconfiguration and which component should then configure
> the connection so that it works?
>
> I certainly feel strongly that unless there is an exceptionally strong
> reason for not adding the default gateway route, we should do so
> automatically and give the user a working network connection.

The problem is that in this case the network configuration from the
DHCP server was completely wrong, evidently windows works around this
by using proxy-arp if the default gateway is wrong or not present.

So should Linux behave the same way or should it assume that the
settings given to it are sane?  I personally lean towards saying that
there shouldn't be any heroic measures to work around a broken network
since it would only mask the problem.

The proper place would be with networking in the Linux kernel since
Network Manager just brings up the connection.  Dan/Robert, am I
correct in saying that this is not something Network-Manager can or
does handle?

A mirror of that mailing list is available via gmane at
gmane.linux.network but like most kernel mailing lists make sure you
are certain about the behavior and see if you can research why the
behavior is happening before posting.  It is likely that using
proxy-arp is simply an option that your kernel maintainer decided not
to enable.  Most of those mailing lists are very high traffic so
non-well researched posts get passed over quickly.

Also if you are certain that this is not something that is simply not
enabled and there is no valid reason for it you can file a bug at
http://bugzilla.kernel.org, though again a well researched bug report
is important.