Garpd

Broadcasts Gratuitous ARPs for a list of MAC address <-> IP address mappings on specified interfaces at regular intervals. A gratuitous ARP request is an AddressResolutionProtocol request packet where the source and destination IP are both set to the IP of the machine issuing the packet and the destination MAC is the broadcast address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff. Ordinarily, no reply packet will occur. Gratuitous ARP reply is a reply to which no request has been made. Gratuitous ARPs are useful to update ARP tables of switches, routers and other hosts to route packets to a designated IP address. Garpd was developed as a part of GNU FreeIPMI project. Some of the IPMI implementations doesn't implement GARP broadcast functionality in their NICS. When the host OS is down and BMC is active listening for IPMI packets on the NIC, it needs to inform other switches/routers to route packets to its NIC. Because Garpd is useful for other purposes too, we decided to make it as a separate project.

Last updated 14 Nov, 2006

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