SPARP

SPARP is the term created to describe the spamming of A.R.P. (address resolution protocol) requests to RESOLVE I.P.v4 addresses to its MAC address. What a computer does when it's sending packets on the media (type of connection) is it sends a A.R.P. request to get the MAC of the interface card it's sending it too. Now a computer only does this if the MAC address is not within the computers A.R.P. table. To see your A.R.P. table go to command prompt in windows and type "arp -a" minus the quotation marks. SPARP was also found to only occur in certain Situations. These situations include the use of a virtual machine, and the input of a wrong default gateway. A virtual machine is a program that lets you run a "virtual" computer within an already running OS. A couple of example programs are VMWare's Workstation and Microsoft's Virtual PC. If you have this installed on your computer, you're not necessarily going to be SPARPing as soon as its installed. You have to manually mess it up to create this problem. The only way it's been discovered to SPARP is to input the wrong default gateway into your TCP/IP settings. Once this happens, packets are sent out onto the media at a continuous rate trying to find the wrong gateway. It's a simple fix, but if it isn't fixed, expect your network connection speed to become slow. Seeing as A.R.P. is used to resolve MAC addresses, and MAC addresses are only used for local use, you only see this happen in a single network. Once it goes towards a router, the MAC address is stripped from the packet and replaced with the routers MAC. So it's right to assume that this would only slow down a single network.

This term was created on the 2nd of November, 2007. It was discovered through the use of Wireshark, which is displayed on the image on the left.

References:
WireShark - http://www.wireshark.org/
Students in Network Support and Internet Specialist Programs
at Winnipeg Technical College - http://www.wtc.mb.ca/ (They came up with the term)