SUNOS 3.4 problem

[Ian Donaldson]

roes at seri.philips.nl (Aloys Roes) writes:
>The problem is that the Sun A and C (both SUNOS 3.4) cannot communicate to
>systems in their own network but different subnet meaning that it does not
>take the correct decision on whether to use ARP or routing. e.g SUN A can
>send ICMP echo requests and receives replies from hosts in subnet
>130.144.1 and 130.144.20. Also PING to hosts in network 130.145 and
>130.143 works fine.  However when a PING request is made to a host in a
>remote subnet e.g.  host 130.144.60.80, the SUN does not send the packet
>to the cisco router but does an ARP request on the ethernet with interface
>ie0 instead.  Strangely enough a PING from host 130.144.60.80 gets a reply
>when sent to 130.144.1.115 but not when sent to 130.144.20.99. 

We had a network of Wellfleet routers and Suns set up at RMIT and found
that the SunOS 3.5 ping command didn't obey normal routing rules.  

It was possible to telnet/rlogin to various hosts but it wasn't possible
to ping them.   The network was using class-B addresses subnetted with
255.255.255.0.  pinging hosts on the same subnet worked, but pinging to
another subnet failed.  Pinginging to another network worked ok.

It appeared that the ping command didn't process subnet information
properly (or something).

We solved the problem by turning on proxy-ARP on the Wellfleet routers.
(you shouldn't -need- to do this, but we had to anyway due to running
other machines on the net which didn't understand subnetting)

Ian D