Re: dhclient sucks

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 11:09:55AM -0400, David Gilbert wrote:
> The ISC dhclient would probe multiple interfaces simultaneously.  The
> new one waits for some amount o ftime on my hardwire ethernet (rarely
> used) before probing my wireless.  The result is a longer startup.

Try:

background_dhclient="YES"

hmm, it might be worth allowing this to be a list of interfaces so
rarely used interfaces could be listed and you'd still get the non-POLA
violating synchronous startup on the others most of the time.

> Since the changes to the wireless code, the ISC dhclient would notice
> a change in the state of the wireless (new ssid, for instance) and
> quickly sync up.  The new dhclient sometimes does, but more often than
> not requires that I "ifconfig ath0 ssid foo" ... which is annoying.
> With the old ISC client, leaving the ssid blank was sufficient.

This should not be the case and in fact, the new dhclient should be much
faster because it is immediately notified of changes in association via
the routing socket rather than waiting to poll for changes.

> An extention of this is that randomly, after some long amount of time
> online (often a day or two), ath0 seems to disassociate with the only
> local access point in my home and reqire I ifconfig a bunch of times.
> This may or may not be a dhclient thing --- but I tend to think it's
> related ... if for no other reason than it started occuring at the
> same time as the dhclient was checked in.

This has nothing to do with dhclient since association has nothing to do
with dhclient.   I think it may been worked around with a commit earlier
today.  In my view, most problems with dhclient seem to be driver media
handling issues.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529  9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4