Re: Design misfeature of dhclient for multiple interfaces

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:28:13 +0100
Roy Marples <roy%marples.name@localhost> wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 09:07 -0400, matthew sporleder wrote:
> > I've used that feature of linux before and it is handy (although it
> > only addresses routes and not resolv.conf, etc), but until that
> > feature is available on netbsd would it be possible to fail all
> > config changes if one of them doesn't work?  (or even better-
> > arbitrarily group them per config?)
> 
> That would mean that the interface wouldn't be re-configured until the
> acquired lease expired, which doesn't really help much.
> 
> However, dhcpcd-4.0 did get one final feature before it went stable
> which is of use here. Namely, it can save config's per interface. Out
> of the box, it knows about resolv.conf and ntpd.conf. It can also
> merge configs - with resolv.conf it has a mini resolvconf [1]
> implementation and for ntpd.conf it builds a list of NTP servers to
> append to the main /etc/ntpd.conf.
> 
> Maybe you should try dhcpcd-4.0.1 in pkgsrc/wip.
> If it works for you (it should at least mitigate if not completely
> solve your issue here) then maybe request that NetBSD merges it into
> -current? That would be a good thing as dhcpcd has got a few imporant
> fixes from the version it current has. It obviously won't solve the
> default route issue, but that is being worked on.
> 
I think there are several separate issues.  One is fail-over, which is
indeed important.  A second is what to do when there are multiple
interfaces, which has several aspects: which has priority, when are
leases negotiated, how is auxiliary data bound to the current default
route, etc.  My current failure is with this last point, though (as has
been noted) I'm still grasping for a solution to all of them.