Fedora "Netstat -rn" reports an extra entry "169.254.0.0 ...."

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:07:35PM -0700, Guolin Cheng wrote:
> Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:07:35 -0700
> From: "Guolin Cheng" <guolin at alexa.com>
> To: "Fedora (E-mail)" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Subject: Fedora "Netstat -rn"  reports an extra entry "169.254.0.0 ...."
> Reply-To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> 
> Hi, all,
> 
>  
> 
>  I got an additional entry when I run "netstat -rn" on my fedora host,
> an "169.254.0.0 ..." entry appears without being invited. I know that
> 169.254.0.0/16 is a private address block for some kind of special
> purposes, and it appears in "ifup" script, But my question is: what does
> this entry mean?  And How to get rid of it if it does nothing except
> bring security holes? Since it is routable now through my hosts' exneral
> interface, ridicules..

Google on APIPA       169.254.0.0.
Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) address space of 169.254.0.0/16
(used by Windows 98 and Windows 2000).

It is not supposed to be routed beyond the local subnet so it can be
considered safe for most mortals.  If you have a windows machine (or
other zeroconf friendly box) that grabbed such an address for itself in
the absence of DHCP you could communicate with it.

You can  disable it by setting NOZEROCONF=yes in
/etc/sysconfig/network

See www.zeroconf.org and read more.


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	/dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.