Strange Linux Networking issue:

[Kennedy]

On an embedded system we send an IP address via the kernel command line. This IP address is arbitrary and is there to set a default IP address. These command line parameters are:

ip=192.168.0.100:192.168.0.0::255.255.255.0::eth0:yes

We use an interfaces file that is called by ifup/down. The interfaces file has the following:

# Configure Loopback
auto lo eth0
iface lo inet loopback

# DHCP on the first ethernet device
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth1 inet dhcp

# Static interface for the first ethernet interface, comment out the
# above and uncomment this
iface eth0 inet static
        address 10.120.6.97
        netmask 255.255.252.0
        network 10.120.4.0
        gateway 10.120.4.1

Now, here is a shot of ifconfig eth0

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:0C:01:A8:89
          inet addr:192.168.0.100  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:400 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:45 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:39171 (38.2 KiB)  TX bytes:4074 (3.9 KiB)
          Interrupt:194 Base address:0x8300 DMA chan:8

Here is a shot of route -n:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
10.120.4.0      0.0.0.0         255.255.252.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
127.0.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
0.0.0.0         10.120.4.1      0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

You may note that BOTH the command line parameter and the interfaces file are used on this network adapter. The really odd thing is that I can ping the device from EITHER network (on my development station I set an IP alias of 192.168.0.50 and I could ping, telnet, and do whatever I wanted with that IP address.

So, my question is WHAT IS GOING ON HERE???? I have searched the /sys and /proc directories attempting to find the stale information about the IP addresses and can find nothing. I find what I think is the MAC address under /sys but cannot locate anything else.

My goal is to make it so the interfaces file trumps the command line settings but I don't even understand why/how this is doing this. I didn't even know it was possible to bind two IP addresses to the same interface (not an alias, the SAME interface).

Any ideas?

[Kennedy]

I still don't know what the deal is (this seems completely against the kernel binding protocols) but I am able to remove the unwanted IP address without dropping the whole connection. I found that I can execute the command:

ip address del 192.168.0.100 dev eth0

and I'll instantly only have 10.120.6.97 as the network address.

How funky is that!

[68656c70]

Can you ping both networks from the same device at the same time? That would be odd.