So I understand ARP does IP to MAC mapping. I know ARP is also used by routers, but here I want to talk about what happens when a local workstation uses ARP. So if you want to identify some other workstation's MAC address for local communication, you would naturally use ARP. The first question asked there is who knows this I.P?
But how do I know the I.P of that workstation whose MAC address I want to find out? I mean obviously, I can go to that workstation and find out but is there any other way? Are there any network I.P maps distributed by the network admin? I just wanted to know how this actually happens in a corporate work environment.
Trivial doubt in ARP
Hey @Atharva-Bet great to hear from you again! Let's see if I can help. One of the first things to remember is that the ARP process relies on broadcast communications to discover and map IP addresses to MAC addresses. Broadcast messages will propagate to all devices on a switch (every device will hear it). The first message is an ARP request broadcast message:
While every device will receive the message, only the device with the IP address will respond:
In this example the device that has the 192.168.0.10 will respond to the entire network with an ARP response message, also a broadcast, so every device receives this response. The device that sent the initial ARP request will cache the ARP response which has the IP to MAC mapping in it's ARP cache for future communications. This is the ARP discovery process. I hope this helps and look forward to hearing from you.
Knowledge is a road to be traveled upon, not a destination to be reached~~