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Constant activity on router / cable modem - ARP???

Hello.

I've just moved to Canada from the UK, and this is my 1st cable modem setup. I came home from work to find a nice Motorolo SurfBoard Cable modem set up. I attached a new Netgear WGR614 to the modem, but having done this a strange thing happens.

The internet activity light on the modem flashes continually, as does the Netgear router internet activity light. This happens when no devices are connected or even switched on! I am concerned about the amount of bandwidth being used, and how to conserve it.

I read on a previous post something about ARP requests. What are ARP requests, and why would they be causing constant web activity? Is there a way to disable them (I have de-activated UPnP)?

Thanks in advance, Rob

Reply to
retkaa
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OK, thanks for the reply. But how come the internet activity light stops on the cable modem when I unplug the router? It only flashes like crazy when the router is connected.

Rob

Reply to
retkaa

ARP is Address Resolution Protocol. It is used by server to find out and uniquely identify other machines on a network. ARP messages are sent as an ethernet Broadcast message, which means that every machine on that LAN segment will receive it. Since your neighborhood cable is basically a LAN segment that could carry dozens or hundreds of clients, there are a lot of ARP messages floating around.

They're harmless.

--Gene

Reply to
Gene S. Berkowitz

Because until the router is connected, the modem has nothing to forward the ARP requests to...

--Gene

Reply to
Gene S. Berkowitz

I've seen the same thing on some of Comcrap's setups. They have some system(s) pumping out constant ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) messages to potential messages. For example, you'll see 216.100.100.1,

216.100.100.2... Frankly, I th>Hello.
Reply to
Fafa Fofo

Well, I had the Motorola sb4xxx something modem, I was getting about 10 arps every second. It tended to create lots of firewall entries in the system log until I told the firewall to drop them and not log. Also the send/recieve led was usless because it was always running.

Why should I have to waste my cpu processing power on all the freaking arps when I did not have to.

Now that I have installed a Motorola SURFboard sb5120, no freaking arp requests. Leds now act normally.

Reply to
Bit Twister

ARP and ping are completely different.

If it didn't, you wouldn't be connected to the network. For ARP requests that don't match the mask, about the only 'response' is to flash the LED. Big whoop. There are no packets being sent in response to ARP's that don't match the mask.

Why complain about something that doesn't cause any trouble?

Reply to
Bill M.

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