Arping 0.1 was released 10 years ago last month or so. It’s since been included as a package in Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, Gentoo and some other smaller and bigger OSs and distributions.

It’s interesting that not one of these asked or even let me know, which is kind of fun. I only noticed because I ego-googled. A couple of German magazines did ask before putting it on their CDs. I told them that it’s GPL so they can do what they want, but thanked them for letting me know.

Linux Journal could have told me though.

Arping was rewritten for libnet 1.1 as Arping 2.x. I fixed the IRIX port of libnet 1.1 just so that I could get Arping to work on it.

I get bug reports or feature requests every now and then. Most build errors are due to someone not having libnet and/or libpcap installed. The new version (2.09) checks for these dependencies and present a friendly error message in case they’re missing. If the build still fails it’s nice to just be able to ask the user to send their config.log instead of having to ask back and forth what OS they run and so on.

Some feature requests include a patch. I love those.

Not all bug reports or feature requests are sent to me though. I’ve found a bit in Debians bug database, but just by pure luck.

Arping 2.09 has just been released. Changes include:

  • Changed build system to autotools
  • Beep when there is no reply (-b)
  • Handle getting too many replies