Netgear M7300-24XF (XSM7224S) - ProSAFE 24-port, 10 Gigabit Stackable L2+ Managed Switch User Manual

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Chapter :  Routing 
 
ProSafe® XSM7224S 10G Managed Stackable Switch Software Administration Manual 
ARP
The ARP protocol associates a layer 2 MAC address with a layer 3 IPv4 address. ProSafe® 
Managed Switches software features both dynamic and manual ARP configuration. With 
manual ARP configuration, you can statically add entries into the ARP table.
ARP is a necessary part of the internet protocol (IP) and is used to translate an IP address to 
a media (MAC) address, defined by a local area network (LAN) such as Ethernet. A station 
needing to send an IP packet must learn the MAC address of the IP destination, or of the next 
hop router, if the destination is not on the same subnet. This is achieved by broadcasting an 
ARP request packet, to which the intended recipient responds by unicasting an ARP reply 
containing its MAC address. Once learned, the MAC address is used in the destination 
address field of the layer 2 header prepended to the IP packet.
The ARP cache is a table maintained locally in each station on a network. ARP cache entries 
are learned by examining the source information in the ARP packet payload fields, regardless 
of whether it is an ARP request or response. Thus, when an ARP request is broadcast to all 
stations on a LAN segment or virtual LAN (VLAN), every recipient has the opportunity to store 
the sender’s IP and MAC address in their respective ARP cache. The ARP response, being 
unicast, is normally seen only by the requestor, who stores the sender information in its ARP 
cache. Newer information always replaces existing content in the ARP cache.
The number of supported ARP entries is platform-dependent.
Devices can be moved in a network, which means the IP address that was at one time 
associated with a certain MAC address is now found using a different MAC, or may have 
disappeared from the network altogether (i.e., it has been reconfigured, disconnected, or 
powered off). This leads to stale information in the ARP cache unless entries are updated in 
reaction to new information seen on the network, periodically refreshed to determine if an 
address still exists, or removed from the cache if the entry has not been identified as a sender 
of an ARP packet during the course of an ageout interval, usually specified via configuration.
From the ARP link, you can access the following pages:
Basic
From the Basic link, you can access the following pages: