rarpd8

Usage

Overview

rarpd services Reverse ARP requests on the Ethernet connected to the specified interfaces. Upon receiving a request, rarpd maps the target hardware address to an IP address via its name, which must be present in both the ethers(5) and hosts(5) databases. If a host does not exist in both databases, the translation cannot proceed and a reply will not be sent.

In normal operation, rarpd forks a copy of itself and runs in the background. Anomalies and errors are reported via syslog(3).

The options are as follows:

-a

Listen on all the Ethernets attached to the system. If -a is omitted, a list of interfaces must be specified.

-d

Run in debug mode, with all the output to stderr. This option implies the -f option.

-f

Run in the foreground.

Not on Linux.

-l

Log all requests to syslog(3).

Not on Linux, FreeBSD or macOS.

-t

Only honour a request if the server (the host that rarpd is running on) can "boot" the target; that is, if a file or directory called /tftpboot/ipaddr exists, where ipaddr is the target IP address expressed in uppercase hexadecimal (only the first 8 characters of filenames are checked).

Not on Linux or macOS.

Files

/etc/ethers

Ethernet host name database.

/etc/hosts

Host name database.