Re: Late to the party - multiple search domains on the network.

[Simon Kelley <simon thekelleys org uk>]

Dan Williams wrote:

> Note that at some soon point we're going to switch to using dhclient rather than 
> our internal DHCP client.  Jason VasDias at Red Hat is adding in the support to 
> dhclient that would be required to use it with NetworkManager.  That should fix 
> up most compatibility problems too.
>
> Dan

I'm planning to build a D-bus enabled DHCP client. The DHCP side will do 
the same DHCP thing that every other DHCP client does, but instead of 
having the usual set of ad-hoc scripts and bits to do configuration: 
there will be a D-bus interface.

The current plan has an interface an a d-bus object, with methods to

. Set/query current DHCP lease status (address and expiry times)
. Obtain a new lease.
. Release a lease.
. Renew a lease.
. Query a configuration setting from the DHCP server. (using DHCPINFORM, 
and cached.)

It will be the responsibility of the user of this interface to pass the 
configuration information to the system, and act on it by setting 
default routes, etc. The only part of the kernel's state which will be 
directly manipulated by the DHCP client will be interface address and 
up/down status. (This is because the client has to be sure that the 
interface will come down at the end of a lease, to keep the network 
stable.)

Does that sound like it might be useful for networkmanager? I wouldn't 
expect you to commit to it ATM ("show us the code" and all that), but it 
will certainly happen, so you might want to bear it in mind. OTOH that 
might be the sort of thing Jason VasDias is doing with dhclient, so I 
could pick  up his work for the applications I have in mind.

Cheers,

Simon.