Enabling martians...
 

I have a very old client system I need to do a bootp on a autonomous (closed) network (with a Suse server). The problem is the client starts up with a default IP of 127.0.0.2 on the eth0 port. Suse 9.2 is silently discarding all eth0 traffic with a 127 ip. Normally this would be desirably appropriate, but this is one case where I must be able to process the bootp traffic until the BOOTREPLY assigns a proper IP. The original client source is lost forever so I can't correct it. Nothing will make Suse accept the BOOTREQUEST (iptables, route, etc.). Using packETH I've confirmed that the issue is solely the 127 source address in the MAC encapsulation. How do you get Linux to accept martians???
Thanks,
Frank

Wow, now that's a problem! Can't just ifconfig 127.0.0.0/8 to an outside interface (rather than localhost)? Never tried moving the assignment of localhost before, bet it breaks tons of things in the process as well. Even if it's possible, you're probably going to end up with a dedicated BOOTP server...

The server is going to be a standalone bootp server on an internal isolated network. .. tried ifconfig, too. Didn't help. This should be easy. tcpdump picks up the packets. Ethereal gives me an analysis of them. I can simulate them with packETH and test options. Somewhere they are being dumped in the stack. I'm checking source code now. I was hoping it was in route.c but I don't see it. Believe me, I'd fix the workstation bootstrap loader if the source wasn't lost. I'm down to work-arounds!

- Frank