I've had some issues recently with ARP and am getting conflicting answers from JTAC, from google searching (and Google AI answers I can't substantiate) and emperical evidence.

We have the arp aging-timer set to 5[minutes]. Junos adds a random jitter to that value for each ARP entry to stagger ARP timeouts...so I see ARP table entries refresh and get TTE's of 5-6 minutes.

Where we've run into issues, and things get murky is exactly what the behavior should be when an ARP entry expires (and how refcnt might alter that behavior). When doing FBF / policy routing utilizing next-ip, the behavior we've seen recently is that the next-ip's ARP entry expires and then the volume of traffic hitting the next-ip rule causes a resolve ucast-v4 ddos-protection protocol violation. When the ddos-protection policer kicks in, sometimes the violation is brief and unnoticed. Sometimes it will persist indefinitely (until traffic stops hitting the FBF next-ip rule) causing policy routed traffic to blackhole.

I can't find detailed documentation on this from Juniper, but according to Google AI, Junos treats ARP entries with refcnt > 0 differently than refcnt = 0. In practice, I've not been able to find an ARP entry with refcnt = 0. It seems more like 1 is as low as refcnt can be, and an ARP entry that's next-hop for a route increments that entry's refcnt for each such active route.

What I've seen watching the ARP table is entries with refcnt > 1 can have their TTE reach 0, but they are not immediately removed. Instead, they seem to be retained while an ARP is sent, and if a reply is received, the TTE is reset.

I can't find this behavior documented anywhere, but it's what I'm seeing.
So, I'm wondering if, when using next-ip in FBF, if it's best practice / required to have at least one route with that next-ip as next-hop (or just resort to a static ARP entry for the next-ip)?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)              |  I route
 Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng  |  therefore you are
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