Baslinux mailing list

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Hi,

I did some experimentation with wireshark, and found some interesting
results.  Evidently, something is stopping the network stack from
sending ARP packets.  However, it seems to receive ARP packets just
fine.  Therefore, when I tried to ping my 486 box with my laptop, the
486 box was able to get the MAC address of my laptop when my laptop
sent out an ARP request, but was unable to respond to this request
with its own MAC address, thus making my laptop unable to send out any
pings - the ARP request timed out.  However, if immediately after
trying to ping with my laptop, I then manually added an ARP mapping
for the 486 box, the pings went through succesfully.  This only lasts
for a limited amount of time, though, because at some point the 486
box attempts to do another ARP request, which then fails to ever get
sent, causing the 486 box to wait for another ARP reply - I have to
manually REMOVE the arp entry on my laptop, ping the 486 box again
(thus causing my laptop to send out another ARP request), and then
re-add the arp entry in order to get pings through again.

My initial suspicion was that the driver was not allowing the sending
of ethernet broadcast frames, but then I tried running udhcpc, and
that was able to transmit UDP packets over broadcast ethernet
perfectly (also confirming that the dhcp client was working properly).
 It seems that something in the kernel is preventing the sending of
ARP packets.  Is there some setting that I'm missing that would cause
this?  I tried a quick google search but didn't find anything.

Regards,
Jason