Home / server / Questions / 42984
Accepted
Mike Mazur
Asked: 2009-07-21 06:03:27 +0800 CST

Why is my system constantly downloading from 255.255.255.255:bootps?

  • 772

On my workstation I noticed that my network utilization is high and constant even though I don't have any downloads currently going. I fire up iftop and see the following entry at the top:

255.255.255.255:bootps     =>  * :bootpc                    0b      0b      0b
                           <=                             133Kb   162Kb   163Kb

The actual download speeds vary between 70Kb to 170Kb or more. bootps is port 67, bootpc is port 68.

I have no idea what this might be. Has anyone seen this before? Is some system on this LAN going haywire?

networking troubleshooting local-area-network

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There's nothing abonormal going on. You're seeing BOOTP or DHCP requests / responses to / from other computers on the wire. They just broadcast traffic, so I suppose, technically, you could say that your computer is "downloading" the traffic but it's just being ignored and thrown away by your OS.

    • 4
    • 0