The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is the mechanism that ties a computer MAC address to an IP address. When a computer needs to send as packet to another computer on the network, that packet needs to be addressed with the MAC address of the receiving computer. The sender knows the IP address and will send out an ARP packet to get the MAC address that belongs to the computer that has the IP address requested. The ARP packet looks like this:
The packet is addressed to the Ethernet broadcast address of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, basically asking anyone with the IP address of 192.168.179.131 to respond with its MAC address. ...
