I've been pulling out my hair trying to figure out why certain network objects in my home can't find each other. Then I plugged in a packet sniffer to watch what was going on.
To my shock, I found that ARP was sending requests to the wrong set of addresses.
What was going on is this:
I have a network with a /16 subnet mask.
Take for instance 10.1.2.3 as the phone's address. ARP was inquiring as to whether the following addresses were in use: 10.1.0.1 10.1.0.2 10.1.0.3 .
.
.
10.1.0.253
10.1.0.254
End of Search Essentially ARP was igoring how network subnets work and simply assumed the third number of the IP address is always 0. I find it hard to believe anyone who can spell "Network Programming" would implement anything like this.
I have questions for you:
1. Can an application vendor send out ARP packets with a lack of understanding of what networks are and how they work? Meaning, could these be sourced from somewhere other than the operating system or hardware vendor?
2. Is there any chance that Google (Android) or Samsung mangled the ARP implementation?
3. Does anyone have any creative theories as to what could be causing this. It's certainly creating chaos for me and my network.
