Why am I seeing MailSlot Browse messages on unrouted ports of my Linux box?

Posted by nmichaels on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by nmichaels
Published on 2010-12-30T22:59:38Z Indexed on 2010/12/30 23:55 UTC
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I have a Linux box (Debian squeeze) with several NICs. The ones of interest are:

  • eth3 - my main link to the network (dhcp on 10.20.30.0/24)
  • eth0 - the first connection to my test network (static: 192.168.1.2)
  • eth4 - the second connection to my test network (static: 192.168.1.1)

My routing table looks like this:

$ sudo route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.20.30.0      *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth3
default         10.20.30.254    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth3

I have the 2 test net ports connected to each other with a crossover cable and an instance of wireshark running on each port. Every once in a while, I'll see a packet like the following show up. MailSlot Packet

Who could be doing this, and how do I convince them to stop? I do have Samba running on the machine (for a cifs mount) but don't see why it would be sending packets out to unrouted ports. I had a Windows VM running in VMWare Client and thought that might be causing it, but it still happens without it.

What I want is totally silent interfaces so I can run some tests with Scapy over them.

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