[Eug-lug] arp kernel voodoo question for the gurus.

[larry price]

On 8/18/07, Bob Miller <kbob at jogger-egg.com> wrote:
> What's the problem that requires short ARP timeouts?

A very puzzling issue with two machines that would drop off the
network for two minutes every twelve minutes.

Close analysis of the packet dumps told me that every outage ended
with an arp request from the affected host for the gateway address.
Once i knew that

arping -i eth0 $gw_ip_address

run from cron every 9 minutes was sufficient to prevent the outage.
but that solution was rather hacky, setting
net.ipv4.eth0.bae_reachable_time in sysctl.conf with a comment as to
why is a much cleaner solution.