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ARP

jonk34567
Level 4
Level 4

what is the function of ARP ?  convert MAC to IP    or   IP to MAC ?

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Hello,

so it associates unknown MACs to known IPs.

That is correct.

can it associate unknown IPs to known MAC

No, ARP cannot perform this function. ARP was specifically designed to solve the question of how to find out the MAC address of a host that is in the same IP network as you are, given that you know that host's IP address.

There was a protocol called Reverse ARP (RARP) whose purpose was to perform a backward mapping, from known MAC to unknown IP. This protocol was a very old predecessor of modern DHCP, and allowed diskless stations to find out what IP address they should be using. RARP is not used nowadays.

Best regards,
Peter

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4 Replies 4

Peter Paluch
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Hi,

The purpose of ARP is to discover what MAC address does a particular IP address in the same network reside on; in short, it associates unknown MACs to known IPs (from a known IP, it finds out the MAC address of the card that is configured with the IP address). It is not really a conversion of one address to another, rather, just a lookup and an association.

Best regards,
Peter

 so it associates unknown MACs to known IPs. can it associate unknown IPs to known MAC

Hello,

so it associates unknown MACs to known IPs.

That is correct.

can it associate unknown IPs to known MAC

No, ARP cannot perform this function. ARP was specifically designed to solve the question of how to find out the MAC address of a host that is in the same IP network as you are, given that you know that host's IP address.

There was a protocol called Reverse ARP (RARP) whose purpose was to perform a backward mapping, from known MAC to unknown IP. This protocol was a very old predecessor of modern DHCP, and allowed diskless stations to find out what IP address they should be using. RARP is not used nowadays.

Best regards,
Peter

It you don't already know, if might help to understand how ARP works.

A host broadcasts a ARP query, so all hosts on the broadcast domain see the query.

The query basically says, who has IP x.x.x.x?

If there's a host with the sought for IP, it responds.

The response has the host's MAC. So, once the host that made the ARP request receives it, it now knows what MAC to use for an IP.

The requesting host saves the information in a cache, so if it needs to translate an IP to a MAC again, if first checks the ARP cache, and if an entry is found there, for an IP, it uses associated MAC.

Entries in the ARP cache are only retained for a fixed amount of time. Once an entry expires, the host will need to again broadcast a ARP query (as above).

One issue you can run into, if for some reason a host's MAC changes, a host using ARP cache information will attempt to send to the cached MAC information, which results in frames being undelivered. If this happens, the problem will resolve if the cache entry expires, due to being too old, or if you have the host clear its ARP cache.

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