Reply to ALL IP addresses?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hannes
  • Start date Start date
H

Hannes

Is it possible to configure a Windows 2000 (Server) machine to reply
to ALL IP addresses, or all addresses in a specific range?

I know this sounds silly, but it would make perfect sense in our
application.


/ Hannes.
 
it makes no sense to reply to 'all' addresses since then there would be no
other address that could send anything to it since it would always conflict
with the server address. you can add multiple addresses to the nic to cover
a range if you need to. this also depends on what you mean by 'reply to',
if you are writing an app at a low enough level you could put the interface
in promiscuous mode and receive all traffic on the network and do with it as
you would like... this is how packet sniffers and other network monitoring
tools work.
 
If you really want to do it a broadcast replies to all computers on your network as
in 192.168.1.255, though that would need to be controlled via the application. ---
Steve
 
I take it from your two answers that the answer to my question is "NO,
Windows can't do that".

To specify some detail WHY I need this behaviour, is that we already
have an so-called intermediate driver (based on PASSTHRU) installed,
that is screening all packets to our MAC address. As our box
represents a whole bunch of IP addresses on the external network, the
filter driver is forwarding those of interest for Windows and other
user space applications.

The user space is not aware of what external IP addresses the box
currently is using, so we were hoping to NAT the traffic and pass up
packets sent to internal IP addresses.

For packets going back out again, we were hoping to map these internal
addresses in a one-to-one mapping to external IP addresses, in order
to know what external source address to put on the packets.

It would be useful if Windows could reply to a whole range of internal
IP addresses (e.g. 10.10.10.1 - 10.10.10.254) so that we could
dynamically alter the number of external IP addresses currently in use
by the box.


Sending it all to one internal address won't work, as we don't know
what external address that corresponds to when transmitting packets.


/ Hannes.

/ Hannes.
 
it sounds to me like you are trying to write your own router that does nat
and has some filtering rules. why not use a real router?
 
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