Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Xserve@home · Feb 6, 2006, 09:51 PM

I run arp -a occasionally on my machine at home, and get this weird output

Code:
(192.168.1.255) at ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff on en0 [ethernet]

What is that ??

Kristoff · Feb 6, 2006, 11:09 PM

um, what's strange about that?

It's the broadcast address. without it, arp would not work.

Xserve@home · Feb 7, 2006, 12:19 AM

...but ... I just did it and 255.255.255.255 didn't show up ...

whgoodman · Feb 8, 2006, 11:53 AM

Originally Posted by Xserve@home

...but ... I just did it and 255.255.255.255 didn't show up ...

Arp cache is flushed on a schedule to remove stale addresses. If you haven't hit the broadcast address recently and it's marked as stale the process of flushing the cache will remove it. Try pinging when you don't see it [if you're on a small home network] and it should appear again.

On a side note, 255.255.255.255 is the netmask. 192.168.1.255 is the broadcast address.

Xserve@home · Feb 12, 2006, 11:41 PM

Thanks for the help