Re: wackamole query

On Tuesday, Jul 29, 2003, at 09:41 US/Eastern, Ashton Trey Belew wrote:

>> The other issue I'd mention is that there have been problems with some
>> platforms in the past where you needed to have an address already on
>> eth0 in order for Wackamole to correctly function, so 0.0.0.0 might 
>> not
>> be enough.
>
>         This is precisely my problem.  Does anyone perchance know 
> where I
> should start poking around to try to change wackamole to work properly
> with a null address?

Just curious, does wackamole act correctly when you have a bogus IP on 
that interface to start with?

i.e. if 192.168.123.0/24 isn't used anywhere on your network.  Can you 
work around the problem by assigning each machine an address in that 
netblock?  I am not sure if that will fix the problem, but it may.

I think the problem is more complex that we are assuming.  As I recall, 
Linux has "issues" with bringing down the "primary" IP address on an 
interface and leaving the other enabled.  So if you add .1, .2, .3, .4 
and then remove .1, they all go bye-bye.  I think that is because Linux 
doesn't have a clear concept of an IP alias -- it instead has this 
notion of eth0:1 where you have a secondary virtual network interface 
instead.

The reason I think this is the root of the problem is because wackamole 
acts as expected on FreeBSD and Solaris.

If anyone can do the legwork of verifying that this is indeed the 
problem, I will puzzle out how to work around it on Linux.

-- 
Theo Schlossnagle
Principal Consultant
OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc. -- http://www.omniti.com/
Phone:  +1 410 872 4910 x201     Fax:  +1 410 872 4911
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