Re: 169.254/16 in route table

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 16:13, Marcelo Medici wrote:
> I am a bit confused as to why I am seeing this network in my routing
> table. I am familiar with this net being used as a test net and have seen
> it pop up in Windows clients failing to receive a response to a dhcp
> request, but I was surprised to see it under my Linux machine.
> I am running ISC's dhcp server to hand out ip addresses to only two
> clients. One linux, one windows. Both linux machines are running redhat
> with the latest samba rpm from redhat.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> #route
> Kernel IP routing table
> Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use
> Iface
> 10.6.21.0       *               255.255.255.248 U     0      0        0
> eth0
> 169.254.0.0     *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0
> eth0
> 127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
> default         10.6.21.1       0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0
> eth0

169.254.0.0/16 is the netblock reserved for IP link-local addresses
using the draft Zeroconf standard.  Zeroconf is better known in its
incarnation as Apple's Rendezvous.

The same netblock is used in basically the same way with Microsoft's
Universal Plug 'n Play.  It should be pointed out that the security
problems with UPnP are not related to its use of link-local addresses in
this way.

Routes like this one are stopgap responses that allow Linux to somewhat
participate in Zeroconf/Rendezvous networks.  There are several projects
afoot to write a real implementation for Unix-like systems.

For more information, look at zeroconf.org.
-- 
Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>

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