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

[Matt Morgan]

On 04/20/2004 05:13 PM, Benno Goedhart wrote:

> Guolin Cheng wrote:
>
>> 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..
>
>
> It means you have an additional network card, without an active 
> connection. The card tries to retrieve an IP address from a DHCP 
> server which is supposedly not present. Then this address will be 
> assigned to it.

And chances are, the DHCP server is "not present" because there is no 
network cable plugged into that interface. In which case don't worry 
about routing over it :-). Use

/sbin/ifconfig

as root to list all your adapters (in case you didn't already know) and 
figure out which is this one.