Re: PATCH: duplicate IP detection

Shannon Aldinger (god@yinyang.hjsoft.com)
Thu, 14 Oct 1999 03:37:27 -0400 (EDT)


> After wondering why linux doesn't detect when someone steals its IP, just
> like Solaris, Irix, and windows to name only a few, do, I decided to write a
> kernel patch to fix this.
>
I hope you can turn this on/off via /proc or at compile time.
There are situations where linux's old behavior is useful.

Example situation:
While setting up a test machine at a university, I was given an unassigned
IP. Somebody had happened to be using the IP though. Both machines were
NT, so they throw up a little message box telling you about the IP
conflict. The user whom had taken the IP, just kept clicking Ok, without
reading the error. After quite a few minutes of this, I brought up a linux
machine with the offending IP. In about 2 minutes, a call came into the
helpdesk reporting the error.

So linux's current behavior as far as duplicate IPs, can be handy.
If this new behavior, can be turned off via /proc, defaulting to catching
duplicates is not a bad thing. Maybe /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conflict?

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