Broadcast ARP response - will dropping it cause problems?

Question

Are there common machines or OSs that will have problems connecting on a network where unicast ARP requests or broadcast ARP responses are not supported? I am providing a public Wi-Fi service, and considering blocking these types of ARP packet. Will this cause connectivity issues for contemporary clients?

Answer 1

The ARP specification has recently been updated with RFC 5227 which talks about the use of gratuitous ARP packets for "address conflict detection".

If you block ARP response broadcasts this ACD is not possible.

Answer 2

Broadcast ARP is used by some High-Availability IP-Takeover schemes to announce the new MAC-address on switch-over.