DragonFly without net connection [Was: OpenBSD dhclient]

[Hasso Tepper]

On Friday 14 March 2008 Matthias Schmidt wrote:
> It is a clean rewrite (in some parts) of the ISC dhclient and contains
> nice features like privilege separation.  IIRC Hasso also discovered an
> issue with our dhclient, but I can't remember what is was :)

It's part of bigger set of issues called "DragonFly without net 
connection".

Our dhclient doesn't have link detection and doesn't have sensible 
timeout. Ie. you boot laptop with ifconfig_if0="DHCP" and really don't 
have cable connected, you are screwed - dhclient is started and the only 
way out is Ctrl+C ... Should be OK? No ... even lo0 will not be 
configured after this (at least in my laptop where I use ath(4) and 
bwi(4)).

> I have the client running on a number of machines for some months and
> experienced no problems.ifconfig_ath0="up DHCP WPA"

Tested-by: me as well ;)

Anyway, OpenBSD dhclient has both - link detection and sensible timeout - 
and therefore solves part of issue. Time out is still long enough (WPA 
association might take more time) that I'd like to use Ctrl+C sometimes. 
So, lo0 issue should be solved anyway. Anyone knows _any_ _good_ reason 
not to configure lo0 anyway and not to rely on /etc/defaults/rc.conf etc?
AFAICS both NetBSD and OpenBSD have lo0 configuration hardcoded (with some 
more stuff) into network startup scripts.

And one more issue ... dntpd(8) is pointlessly verbose IMHO without 
network connection. I often work with my laptop without net and log is 
full of:

Mar 13 08:07:13 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 0.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
Mar 13 08:07:13 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 1.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
Mar 13 08:07:13 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 2.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
Mar 13 08:07:18 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 0.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
Mar 13 08:07:18 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 1.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
Mar 13 08:07:18 pos dntpd[627]: Unable to resolve server 2.pool.ntp.org: 
Connection refused
etc

One line per server should be enough?


-- 
Hasso Tepper