Switching to ISC open source dhcpclient

[andib]

There are at least 2 problems with xwlan and DHCP. As OS/2 - eCS dhcp client has problems we can not solve the goal is switching to ISC open source dhcpclient.

For traceability the current DHCP problems are documented in this ticket.
1) eCS client does not work with 2 DHCP servers. IIRC client sends DHCPREQUEST with wrong server data.
2) eCS client seems to configure routes before 'old' interface is deleted which leads to wrong routing in stack. This may be related to #3.

[andib]

This should be

[diver]

it could even make sense to speak with Alex Taylor about it, so dhclient could get the default DHCP client for eCS.

[andib]

Think this is not a good idea as it will confuse eCS - OS/2 users who are used to dhcpd and the standard dhcp gui and conf. But could be installed in parallel of course. Moreover this will lead to problems for people who 'yum install dhcp' as they have 2 versions of dhclient installed then.

Anyway current xwlan v3.12 code kills OS/2 dhcpd daemon if it runs and starts dhclient instead. This can be problematic for people who want to run their wired interface with dhcpd outside the control of xwlan or use some special dhcpd features. But probably these use cases are very very limited.

[diver]

I disagree on that a bit, as xwlan is part of ecs and when the new version is delivered it makes no sense to have 2 dhcp systems. I really vote for one solution only. Of course the one solution is dhclient.

I see it as a similar case as NAPS. NAPS also replaces MPTS for good. And an easier interface is always better.

Eventually reopen the ticket would not hurt, or add a cross ticket to the ecs bugtracker.

[andib]

I'm not involved in eCS development and I'm not in the position to decide what's in eCS or not. I fear deleting OS/2 dhcpd in eCS will lead to support questions / bug reports from people using some dhcp options which does not work anymore or works different with dhclient. Currently there are not much bug reports about dhcpd so I guess the wast majority do not have any problem with it. On the other hand the only benefit I see with ISC dhclient is for setups with more than one dhcp server. This is what I have but seems to be not very common.

I'm willing to help people who want to use the upcoming xwlan with dhclient as much as it's possible with my limited dhcp know ledge and limited spare time. But I never can support more sophisticated dhcp setups. So I don't want to be the one who triggers kicking out old dhcpd from eCS. Feel free to discuss this on the eCS developers channels which I do not have access to. Or maybe you should open a ticket at bugs.ecomstation.nl for discussing this.

[Lewisr]

Just to weigh in on this...

While I agree that a single, unified, more capable DHCP client should be included in the base eCS installation (as well as an IPv6-aware stack!), this is beyond the scope of this project (i.e., nothing said or done here will have any direct impact on Mensys' determination as to what may or may not be included in the base installation (and there are lots of other related components which would likely need to be modified/shimmed/faked in order to accept a different DHCP client.

Great strides, here, though; the ISC client seems to work quite well with XWLAN 3.12 beta.

Apologies for the discussion in the bugtracker; don't mean to make more bug spam.

[andib]

Nearly done with v3.12beta2. Only thing left to do is to convince Yuri to import my changes into dhclient and dhconf and make a new rpm package.