[plug] Strange kernel messages, is any able to help please?

[Peter Weatherall]

Chris Griffin wrote:

> I will take a look as you suggest. This system is only on our internal 
> network and NOT exposed to the Internet at all. What does it mean by 
> "martians"?
>
> At 11:32 22/05/2003 +0800, you wrote:
>
>> Chris Griffin wrote:
>>
>>> Well at least they are strange to me. I am getting thousands (I kid 
>>> you not) of the following messages in /var/log/messages
>>> Can anyone enlighten me as to what they all mean please?
>>> The box is a Mandrake MNF 8.2 system I am trying to set up. For some 
>>> reason it is also ignoring my custom rules?
>>
>>
>> Are you on telstra cable? If so, oodles of martians are common (or so 
>> I found when I was connected). You can supress them with a setting in 
>> /proc/sys/ipv4 somewhere.
>>
>> I can't remember if the source part of the MAC address header goes 
>> first or last. If first, those could be DHCP broadcasts, ARP 
>> requests, etc. Can you do a "tcpdump -i eth0 -s 0 -w /tmp/dump" and 
>> analyse with ethereal - maybe that'll tell you more.
>>
>> Craig
>
>
>
Martian Addresses are discussed in RFC1812.
See section 5.3.7 "Martian Address Filtering"

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1812.ht


Regards