Christopher Hunt wrote:
Ken, I think Pasi's on to something there, I bet the GATEWAY command in ifcfg-eth0 is mistyped or has a syntax error. In the interem, however, a better hack might be to move the route statement from rc.local, which only runs at boot, to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0 . That will enable the network service to restart or the eth0 interface to downup without removing the default route.
Thanks for this tip. I removed the GATEWAY and GATEWAYDEV from /etc/sysconfig/network which got rid of the initial (incorrect route) and added
default via 192.168.144.6 dev eth0 onlink
to the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0
Note the use of the 'onlink' option. It appears to be working fine without the arp traffic.
I guess I thought this was a more common configuration when using Xen in a routed configuration. I'm not sure if the network scripts allow a mechanism to add the 'onlink' option so that GATEWAY/GATEWAYDEV specified are actually used. Grepping through the network-scripts does not yield anything.
If other people are using this in the same way I am, you will need to do this change or else there will be all the unnecessary arp cache activity for every single ip address which might fill up your arp table.