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Wow, somehow that use of random and slowly ARP proxying as a duct-taped together load balancing mechanism makes this so much cooler.

I'm not sure I quite understand the details, though. I assume there was only one gateway for the segment, so were the spoofed ARP replies unicast instead of broadcast? Otherwise, wouldn't all clients just switch to whatever machine announced their spoof for the gateway IP last?

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This was 13 years ago so my memory is fuzzy... if I recall correctly, spoofed ARP replies were unicasted to every possible address on the network. It switched from machine to machine slowly, which is fine because they all served the same content.

There were several subnets at the school, each with its own gateway. I remember having to set up live CDs in several computer labs to cover each of the subnets.

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