[ale] can anyone provide a thumbnail sketch of how arp is supposed to work ?

[Joseph A Knapka]

Courtney Thomas wrote:
> 
> Greetings !
> 
> My lan web router goes out and talks to my ISP when a simple local lan
> query is launched and sometimes consumes enough time to cause the client
> to time out.

This is probably a DNS issue, not an ARP issue. ARP is
used only on the local subnet, to discover the MAC
address associated with an IP address. ARM requests
should never ever travel outside the local net.

Make sure your /etc/nsswitch.conf file contains the
line "hosts: files dns", and that the hostnames on
your network appear in /etc/hosts. That will eliminate
the query to the ISP nameserver that's doomed to
fail anyway. Or you could run a local nameserver,
which isn't really that hard.

Cheers,

-- Joe
  Using open-source software: free.
  Pissing Bill Gates off: priceless.

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