Using the Address Resolution Protocol
The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is part of the TCP/IP protocol stack. It’s used to translate TCP/IP addresses to MAC addresses using broadcasts. When a machine running TCP/IP wants to know which machine on an Ethernet network is using a certain IP address, it will send an ARP broadcast that says, in effect, “Hey…exactly who is IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx?” The machine that owns the specific address will respond with its own MAC address, supplying the answer. The machine that made the inquiry will respond by adding the newly gained information to its own ARP table.
In addition to the normal usage, the ARP designation refers to a utility in Windows that you can use to manipulate and view the local workstation’s ARP table.
The Windows ARP Table
The ARP table in Windows includes a list of TCP/IP addresses and their associated physical (MAC) addresses. This table is cached in memory so that Windows doesn’...
