Subject: mounting a dual-address machine
To: None <netbsd-help@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Stefan Monnier <stefan.monnier@lia.di.epfl.ch>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 02/12/1996 09:53:10
I'm having problems when trying to mount a server that has two addresses,
both acessible. The machine's name is "nestor" and it has two A records in
the DNS table. The first corresponds to "nestor-e" (an ethernet interface)
and the second corresponds to "nestor-f" (an FDDI interface). Ping on any
address works fine. Also

	mount nestor-f:/ /mnt

works fine, but

	mount nestor-e:/ /mnt

blocks for ever. The packets look like this:

	liasun13.epfl.ch -> nestor-e.epfl.ch NFS C STATFS FH=0028
	nestor-f.epfl.ch -> liasun13.epfl.ch RPC R XID=904 Success
	liasun13.epfl.ch -> nestor-f.epfl.ch ICMP Destination unreachable (Bad port)

(liasun13 is the NetBSD machine). The problem seems to be that NetBSD doesn't
like it when nestor-f answers to queries to nestor-e. Since the address choosen
for "nestor" is sometimes "nestor-e" and sometimes "nestor-f", it sometimes
works and sometimes doesn't. I've temporarily circmvented the problem by
specifying explicitely "nestor-f" rather than just "nestor".

I'm surprised to see that NetBSD doesn't deal correctly with such situations
since IPaliasing poses the exact same problem and is rather common.
Is this a known bug ?


	Stefan