On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 04:05:18AM -0600, Greg Scott wrote:

quoted

We already had this discussion in July.

"ip neigh add proxy" is independent of /proc/.../proxy_arp.

We did discuss this back in July but never finished.  I posted a bunch
of questions about "ip neigh add proxy" because I haven't seen much in
the way of documentation.  When nobody answered, I left it alone for a
while.  

I found a discussion starting here:
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0110.2/0523.html

where some of the kernel folks are suggesting "ip neigh add proxy" is
deprecated.  By now that discussion is 10 years old and it apparently is
still around.  But for how long?

While the feature is still around after 10 years, Alexey isn't touching
the network stack much anymore. Funny, that.

Appendix B of this 2007 document, http://linux-ip.net/html/index.html,
by Martin Brown also says "ip neigh add proxy" is deprecated.

So now, in addition to my paranoia about proxy ARP in general, I have
this fear I will build a bunch of scripting around "ip neigh add proxy"
only to find it's gone in a future kernel, leaving me in a world of hurt
again.

So humor me and convince me that "ip neigh add" is not on the chopping
block so I can try it with a little bit of confidence.

I'll humor myself instead. I'm shipping this as a feature to customers,
so if it comes up for chopping I'll have to maintain it myself
worst-case.

(I wasn't actually aware that this is supposed to be deprecated. Yes,
it's buggy in that you need "arp" to show the entries, but that's exacly
that - a low-severity bug.)


-David