nping, arp ping behavior simulation

[<Vlad.Mihailov () emerson com>]

Hi folks!

I was using nping to perform level 2 probes using arp packets ('nping --arp <198.18.1.200> -e eth1')  while my eth1 
interface has a different IP subnet of 172.17.1.0/24. The expected behavior was to have a stream of 
arp-who-has/arp-is-at packets regardless of the mismatching subnets (since arp will operate at the level 2 it should 
not matter that the requests are coming from a wrong subnet IP).

But instead nping comes back with an error:

==================================================================================
C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap>nping --arp 198.18.1.200 -e eth1

Starting Nping 0.6.49BETA2 ( http://nmap.org/nping ) at 2015-10-01 11:41 Mountain Daylight Time
Failed to determine route to host 198.18.1.200. Skipping it...
Execution aborted. Nping needs at least one valid target to operate.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap>
==================================================================================

I am not sure if this is something that is easy to implement but it will be sure a nice to have feature. It will allow 
configuring the probing computer with a bogus IP network to perform L2 scans of a new network without setting up an IP 
address that matches the subnet and risking IP-address conflicts.

Thank you.

--
Vlad Mihailov
 T +1 403.212.7409 | C +1 403.607.7311

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