Downtown WiFi DHCP (WAS: Re: [wplug] More on downtown WiFi (fwd))

Brandon Poyner bpoyner at gmail.com
Wed Feb 21 10:28:22 EST 2007


On 2/21/07, Brian A. Seklecki <lavalamp at spiritual-machines.org> wrote:

> Check this: the DHCP server servicing the APs providing service to Oxford
> Center Atrium/Arboretum gives out a /32 subnet mask on lease offers, so
> the default gateway they offer is unreachable.  Very cute.  Amature.
...
> [seklecki at ingress ~]$ ifconfig eth0
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:12:F0:19:82:72
>            inet addr:10.100.8.241  Bcast:10.100.8.241  Mask:255.255.255.255
>            inet6 addr: fe80::212:f0ff:fe19:8272/64 Scope:Link
>            UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>            RX packets:1073 errors:0 dropped:444 overruns:0 frame:0
>            TX packets:25 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>            collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>            RX bytes:341442 (333.4 KiB)  TX bytes:4200 (4.1 KiB)
>            Interrupt:7 Base address:0x2000 Memory:fcffe000-fcffe

That certainly is an interesting configuration.  I can see where
they're trying to go with setting a restrictive netmask, but if you
can't ARP the MAC address of the gateway how exactly are you supposed
to communicate with it?  Linux won't attempt to ARP for anything
outside of its netmask as far as I'm aware.  I wonder if there is a
broken implementation of ethernet/TCP that happily goes along with
that configuration.

-- 
Brandon
Kiva.org - Make a small loan, Make a big difference


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