Blargh

A few months ago I was strolling in the Debian bug tracking system and found a curious bug filed against Arping , a program I maintain. It said that unlike Arping 2.09, in Arping 2.11 the ARP cache was not updated after successful reply. I thought that was odd, since there's no code to touch the ARP cache, neither read nor write. Surely this behaviour hasn't changed? I tried to reproduce the behaviour and sure enough, with Arping 2.09 the arp cache is updated, while with 2.11 it's not. $ arp -na | grep 192.168.0.123 $ # --- First try Arping 2.11 --- $ sudo ./arping-2.11 -c 1 192.168.0.123 ARPING 192.168.0.123 60 bytes from 00:22:33:44:55:66 (192.168.0.123): index=0 time=1.188 msec --- 192.168.0.123 statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% unanswered (0 extra) $ arp -na | grep 192.168.0.123 $ # --- Ok, that didn't change the ARP cache. Now try 2.09 --- $ sudo ./arping-2.09 -c 1 192.168.0.123 ARPI...

Arping 0.1 was released 10 years ago last month or so. It's since been included as a package in Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, Gentoo and some other smaller and bigger OSs and distributions. It's interesting that not one of these asked or even let me know, which is kind of fun. I only noticed because I ego-googled. A couple of German magazines did ask before putting it on their CDs. I told them that it's GPL so they can do what they want, but thanked them for letting me know. Linux Journal could have told me though. Arping was rewritten for libnet 1.1 as Arping 2.x. I fixed the IRIX port of libnet 1.1 just so that I could get Arping to work on it. I get bug reports or feature requests every now and then. Most build errors are due to someone not having libnet and/or libpcap installed. The new version (2.09) checks for these dependencies and present a friendly error message in case they're missi...