What is wrong with Sonic's equipment?

[ulf]

Let me start with that I am a networking person for many years, I am not a novice.

I got Dual Fusion with a static IP range. Last night I tried to add another IP to my firewall (Juniper Netscreen NS-25) but Sonic's equipment never picked up the MAC address for that IP. My remote hosts did receive the traffic but return traffic never got back to me, due to their equipment never populating the arp table. This was verified by calling support.

I also rebooted the Comtrend device and it took Sonic's equipment several minutes to pick up the MAC addresses of both my firewall and many more minutes to pick up the MAC of my virtual machine. It still never picked up the MAC of the new IP I tried to add.

Picking up a MAC and populating the ARP table shouldn't take multiple minutes.

Not too happy about Sonic in this regard right now.

[wa2ibm]

There was a earlier thread about this. Check out:

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=120

[jared]

Hi Ulf,

The DSLAM equipment we use to provide the Fusion service implements some very strict secured ARP methods, and it's MAC address table is only updated via processing ARP requests from clients. As most operating systems and network devices send out gratuitous ARPs when they are configured or connected to the network, this usually does not cause problems. However, in some cases, such as configuring multiple IP addresses on a single host, strange problems can occur.
We are working with our DSLAM vendor to change/correct the way their device handles ARP security to resolve some of these issues. Until those changes are made, we recommend that customers using such devices configure them to gratuitous ARP in any way the device allows. See this thread for a detailed discussion:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=120&p=1566&hilit=arp#p752