strange telnet behavior

[benshafat]

Hi All,

I have a Single-Segment network with two PCs connected via hub, and I'm trying out the basics of networking. Note that these are 2nd-hand machines, so they might be "dirty" from previous use.

Recently, I've noticed something strange: if I telnet

PC1% telnet 10.0.1.12 // this is PC2 ip

Wireshark captures show that, for some reason, PC1 first sends out ARP requests for some other IP - 10.0.1.41. This happens even after I cleared the ARP table using

arp -d *

and cleared the /etc/hosts file from anything other than localhost

Once these ARP requests fail a few times, telnet accesses the explicitly stated ip of 10.0.1.12, so eventually I get a connection. But why this series of unexpected arps?

BTW - when I ping PC1 to PC2, everything works fine and no weird ARP messages are sent.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

benshafat