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Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by StilesCrisis on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:15PM (#49581658)
>Two hosts on the same subnet can reach each other without leaving the LAN.

Barring "very buggy software," when is this false?

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by dipierro on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:19PM (#49581696)
Port- or Client-isolation on Ethernet switches and Wi-Fi access points respectively. Often seen in corporate environments and (properly configured) guest networks.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by StilesCrisis on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:37PM (#49581853)
I feel like the point of those is conceptually "take these things off the LAN." If we allow for that, what even is a LAN?
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by mitxela on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:42PM (#49582540)
You are correct. It explicitly breaks the LAN, does not provide a LAN, only an internet gateway in most cases.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by wmf on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:23PM (#49581724)
There are recent "client isolation" features that prevent P2P communication. Some hosting providers also block customers on the same LAN from attacking each other.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by jrockway on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:25PM (#49581748)
Indeed. You might share a subnet with other customers of your ISP, but your ISP probably doesn't let you ARP poison them.

This isn't even that recent. I remember doing ARP poisoning exactly once and then being surprised that it didn't work everywhere.

I think the falsehood here is that same IPv4 subnet = same link layer network, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by Hikikomori on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:34PM (#49581827)
Did arp poisoning in school and used a tool to show images from websites people visited on the projector. Teacher thought it was fun until someone went to goatse.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by jrockway on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:24PM (#49581742)
Indeed. You might share a subnet with other customers of your ISP, but your ISP probably doesn't let you ARP poison them.

This isn't even that recent. I remember doing ARP poisoning exactly once and then being surprised that it didn't work everywhere.

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by rcxdude on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:21PM (#49581712)
Switches and firewalls can do all kinds of things. Probably the most common case is that public/guest wifi networks often have client isolation set up so that different devices on the network can't contact each other. Same subnet, but only access to the gateway and the internet in practice.

(Also can happen if ARP is not working correctly, which can be a right PITA to debug).

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by taneq on Saturday September 05, 2026 @08:11PM (#49582044)
Most consumer wifi routers I’ve used have a setting to prevent peer-to-peer traffic. Whether this still counts as being on the same subnet is kind of a philosophical question.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by mitxela on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:44PM (#49582548)
An IP subnet is just a block of addresses anyway. Any two addresses both are and are not in the same block, depending on how big of a block you choose.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by taneq on Sunday September 06, 2026 @09:44PM (#49592870)
Only if you don’t consider the subnet mask as part of the IP address configuration.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by mitxela on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:26PM (#49581751)
LAN spread across sites with a WAN in the middle of it. But that's why I said in my comment that a LAN isn't actually a real thing.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by justinlivi on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:20PM (#49581705)
I feel like the better of this is maybe "will" instead of "can"
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by Waterluvian on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:18PM (#49581689)
Yeah… I feel like “falsehoods X believe about Y” need to omit anything a reasonable X would consider to be a bug.

Edit: fair point. Maybe not.

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by rcxdude on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:25PM (#49581743)
I think generally the point of the phrasing is to make you stop considering it a bug,
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by wat10000 on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:27PM (#49581768)
Falsehoods programmers believe about programming: you don’t have to work around other people’s bugs.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by taneq on Saturday September 05, 2026 @08:13PM (#49582052)
It might not be your fault but it sure as hell will be your problem.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by Hikikomori on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:22PM (#49581715)
Some tunnel that extends the subnet somewhere else. Guess it depends on how you define lan.
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by basilikum on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:19PM (#49581694)
VPNs
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs by alanwreath on Saturday September 05, 2026 @08:12PM (#49582050)
I read that like the meme:

<guy with messy hair>Aliens</guy with messy hair>