Nmap Development: Failed to determine dst MAC address

[A Darren Dunham <ddunham () taos com>]

I've looked through the archives, and I found a few older mentions of
"Failed to determine dst MAC address", but it suggested that changes in
the past should cause nmap to print a more helpful error message.  I'm
interested if this should still be happening.

I'm running 5.00 (with pcap 4.0.2) on XP SP3.  I am as you might expect
trying to use this over VPN.  "-iflist" shows all interfaces as type
"ethernet" even the VPN.

$ nmap -iflist

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-01-19 00:23 Pacific Standard Time
************************INTERFACES************************
DEV  (SHORT) IP/MASK        TYPE     UP   MAC
eth0 (eth0)  10.3.2.2/32    ethernet up   00:FF:B8:DA:4B:8A
eth1 (eth1)  192.168.0.8/24 ethernet up   00:1F:3C:43:2F:66
eth2 (eth2)  (null)/0       ethernet down 00:1C:23:4A:0F:74
lo0  (lo0)   127.0.0.1/8    loopback up

DEV    WINDEVICE
eth0   \Device\NPF_{DFC7E06C-A91A-4C67-9E16-EC4466AEC12B}
eth1   \Device\NPF_{76811572-32AD-4BAF-90A2-A52A042A9031}
eth2   \Device\NPF_{1D03FB04-61AA-4E37-977A-6F0244134D0E}

"eth0" is the VPN, eth1 is the machine's normal DSL connection.

Another message I found suggested that this can be caused when the
gateway used no longer exists.  I've checked and every network that is
behind the VPN shows the gateway of my local IP (the /32 above).
Because the gateway is a /32 (and my local IP), I wonder if the problem
is similar to the "scan 255.255.255.255" thread?
(http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2009/q4/203)

I'm actually interested in just doing some very simple TCP port checks.
If that's all that I need, is there a flag that would let nmap just do a
normal TCP open without needing to determine MAC addresses?

Thanks, and sorry if I missed something.
-- 
Darren
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