Hello,
I was reading a book on Cisco routers in which the author says : "The router resets the ARP age counter to zero whenever it sees valid traffic from the corresponding device. This ensures that the addresses of active devices are never flushed out of the cache, no matter how long they have been known."
I am really surprised about that because I have always thought that the ARP age counter was an absolute counter and not relative to the last time a packet was seen coming from the corresponding IP. After reading this, I made some tests which tend to confirm that the ARP age counter is absolute and does not care whether we have active traffic from the corresponding IP or not.
QUESTION 1 : can somebody confirm this please ?
I am unable to find clear assertions in Cisco documentation.
QUESTION 2 : when does the router send a new ARP request ?
For example, when the ARP timeout is 4 hours or 240 minutes (Cisco default value), the router sends an ARP request when reaching 239 minutes (1 minute before the expiration time). Is this value a fixed one (we send an ARP request 1 minute before aging) or is it a relative value (x % of the timeout value) ?
Thanks for your help.
