Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 16:55:01 -0800 From: "David W. Hankins" <David_Hankins@isc.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: dhclient in 6.0 Message-ID: <20060204005501.GD7613@isc.org> In-Reply-To: <61418.24.90.33.115.1139004207.squirrel@mail.el.net> References: <52993.24.90.33.115.1138913403.squirrel@mail.el.net> <59391.24.90.33.115.1138965018.squirrel@mail.el.net> <20060203124325.5f512537.lists@yazzy.org> <57854.24.90.33.115.1138967941.squirrel@mail.el.net> <d8a4930a0602030429q50f6aa39o@mail.gmail.com> <54176.24.90.33.115.1138971301.squirrel@mail.el.net> <20060203130241.GJ44469@pegasus.dyndns.info> <c7aff4ef0602030524y3a2632d3w@mail.gmail.com> <60155.24.90.33.115.1138981486.squirrel@mail.el.net> <61418.24.90.33.115.1139004207.squirrel@mail.el.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
--TRYliJ5NKNqkz5bu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Marcin Jessa wrote: > Son't be silly. What if you dont know what IP you will get from the > lease? That's what working implementation of DHCP is for... I thought that was why FreeBSD moved away from ISC DHCP to OpenBSD dhclient? Actually, I guess I never did understand that move. Certainly, no one ever explained it to me without a great deal of "wifi" handwaving. Let me introduce myself...I'm David Hankins. I work at a small non-profit company you may have heard of called ISC (www.isc.org). I'm a pretty lucky guy, because I get paid to maintain the ISC DHCP package. "See the world, write open source software," they said. For some time we've been fighting a defensive battle. Trying to get time and resources to spend bringing DHCP back out of the dark ages and up to snuff. When I first started working on DHCP, I was volunteering two days a week (don't knock it: I got 3.0.1 final released this way). It seemed the need for maintenance releases would never end. Now, I'm on DHCP full time, we're finally thinking offensively, and we've got DHCP 3.1.0 on our plates, forks in hand. "We at ISC cherish our relevance." If you've heard Paul Vixie say this once, you've probably heard him say it a million times. That's mostly because it's true. We lose relevance every time someone forks our code, or outright stops using our software alltogether. It's also our achilles heel. If you want to see ISC bring about some form of radical, controversial change, history has shown that credible threats of code forks will do it. Threats, mind you. Not acts. It's not supposed to come to that. I used to work with Martin Blapp to bring the ISC DHCP software distribution up to synch with the FreeBSD core and /usr/ports changes. "Reducing our forkiness". I had what I consider a great working relationship with Martin, and he was indespensible in the efforts to synch our sources. I certainly hope he found no reason to complain of me. If he did, he never spoke of it. Until one day, I heard from our sysadmin that FreeBSD 6.0 would use OpenBSD's dhclient. Now, this was pretty shocking to me. There was never a mention that anyone found anything 'missing'. There was never a threat, much less a motivation, of something like increasing code forks or discontinuing use of the software. And I was in the middle of this work I was doing with Martin at the time, poring over code changes to review and incorporate. Usually, you just have to keep your users happy to stay relevant in open source. Not true in this case, I went to bed the night before thinking FreeBSD was under my wing, happily being served well, and woke up the next day in a world where ISC had been kicked out of the house without so much as a bye-or-leave. With a code branch ready to roll for our next feature release that includes what used to be the FreeBSD feature changes, and a code branch of FreeBSD bugfixes now released in the 3.0.4 Beta release (one half of that noble work Martin helped me puzzle through), I was under the impression I was fulfilling all needs, in the absence of all complaint to the contrary. Maybe I was supposed to send someone a Christmas card and pack of candies? So, I pretty much haven't heard from anyone involved with the FreeBSD project ever since. I would have liked to have thought I could have had some sort of influence over that decision by being able to supply the features they needed. In the meantime, I have had more energy to devote to my contacts at various Linux distributions. Together, we've come up with a sort of vague consensus for the future of the ISC dhclient. It involves something called dBus (tearing out OMAPI in that process), switching to a one-daemon-per-interface model rather than the current one-daemon model (and taking care of the problem of integrating different option contents from multiple interfaces), and seeing what we can do to get rid of the tacky BPF requirement that dhclient still clings to for strict RFC2131 conformance. Some day, I hope to interface dhclient closely with the Network Manager; http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/ And in general an open standard for allowing application-layer access to DHCP protocol services and options (Firefox getting http cache parameters or whatnot). Again via dBus. Then there's DHCPv6. There's no one I think I'm supposed to be talking to about architectural plans like these at FreeBSD. So all these plans are pretty much Linux centered. I mean, dBus is open, and Network Manager should build on all platforms, but you know there are always niggling platform specific details to work out. I also haven't had any time to look within FreeBSD to see what this OpenBSD dhclient was all about. So I also still don't even know what base features would get ISC back in the running for...I don't know...FreeBSD 7? Indeed, the schizm has grown so great that I recently installed over my FreeBSD-5 at-work-workstation with SUSE, so that I would have ready access to the tools and environment that my now -only- representative user base was most familiar with. I used to keep Linux at home and FreeBSD at work so that FreeBSD was represented primarily, and Linux was at arm's reach when I had dire need for it. Now I basically only work in Linux. I think we still have a FreeBSD-5 box in the lab if I was feeling nostalgic, but at this point I basically have nothing to do with that platform, save build testing. So I guess you can imagine my surprise when I hear through the grapevine that folks on freebsd-stable are offering the advice of "install /usr/ports/isc-dhcp". I thought we didn't cut the mustard enough to even talk to. If anyone at the FreeBSD project is unhappy with this schizm, it is news to me. If anyone would like to work with me to produce a, I shall term, "working implementation of DHCP" that's well suited to FreeBSD's needs, I would like to hear your thoughts on needs and requirements. Up until this, to me, unusual news, I had been planning the future without FreeBSD in the picture at all. It's surprising to me to think that someone still uses our client software on that platform. --=20 David W. Hankins "If you don't do it right the first time, Software Engineer you'll just have to do it again." Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. -- Jack T. Hankins --TRYliJ5NKNqkz5bu Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFD4/tlcXeLeWu2vmoRAnalAKCky60UDwIIddVmc4090UQ1/lqzQgCgqEAf w22wSamc5I3x1u/69RkCLtw= =ePW7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --TRYliJ5NKNqkz5bu--
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20060204005501.GD7613>