Re: DHCP timeout is too short for this college network

[Daniel Gnoutcheff <daniel gnoutcheff name>]

José Queiroz wrote:
> NM needs a lot of fixes and improvements, but I think that in this
> case, it is completely innocent.
>
> Your dhcp server is too lazy, as you can see: it only answered for the
> initial DHCPDISCOVER on the third attempt, the same for the other
> messages of the DHCP sequence.

I know that getting N-M to work with lazy DHCP servers is a low 
priority. So I hereby volunteer to take on the job myself. :)

dhclient has its own timeout logic, which seems to work nicely with slow 
DHCP servers; the 'timeout' value seems to specify the timeout on the 
DHCPDISCOVER stage, and once a server is found, different rules apply.

So I suppose that one way to address this would be to nuke the DHCP 
timeout logic that resides in N-M, i.e. let dhclient decide when it's 
hopeless. Is there anything preventing me from doing that? Is there 
anything I'm missing, anything that makes it really necessary to have a 
second timeout in N-M?

I was going to dive in and make a patch, but I wanted to ping this list 
before that adventure. :)


> Maybe you should ask for the support team to analyze the traffic
> exchanged between your station and the dhcp server, to understand why
> the messages are being lost.

I've already approached the IT department and offered my help with 
fixing their DHCP issues. They have not been receptive. It doesn't seem 
like they care about this problem much. :(