Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] ARP packet

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:59:34 -0700

On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 6:50 PM, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
These packets are called gratiotous arps and they are sent by a host when 
the interface/link goes up
for the purpose of preloading the arp table on all other hosts in this
broadcast domain.


...and it also
1) informs Ethernet switches of the MAC address of the machine on the port;
2) can provoke error messages if some other machine with a different MAC address thinks it also has that IP address (this is arguably a feature, not a bug, as two machines on the network with the same IP address is often an error).