Re: DHCP timeout is too short for this college network

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 11:34 +0100, Marc Herbert wrote:
> Daniel Gnoutcheff a écrit :
>  
> > OK, the problem I'm having is a college campus network that has really 
> > slow DHCP severs. As in, up to 3 *minutes* to get a lease.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > It's worth mentioning that the resident IT department has acknowledged 
> > the problem. Sadly, it also seems like they aren't going to do anything 
> > about it anytime soon, presumably because Windows and MacOS tolerate the 
> > slowness. So in the meantime, it'd be great to get n-m to work with 
> > networks like these -- and I volunteer to help! (This would be my first 
> > time contributing to a software project, so it might take me a while, 
> > but I'll give it my best shot.)
> 
> Do Windows and MacOS users actually tolerate waiting for 3 minutes before
> getting online? I can imagine some non-Linux leverage here.

They probably don't tolerate 3 minutes to get a DHCPOFFER, but they may
tolerate 3 minutes for the *whole* transaction if an OFFER has been
received within some lower timeout.  Which is what I think we should be
doing in NM, but which I think will take some work in dhclient first.
I'd be happy to be wrong.  As much as I hate screenscraping, the
absolute fallback to this would be to consume dhclient's stdout/stderr
output (making sure never to block the pipe!!) and look for the OFFER.
That's a last resort though.

Dan