The rc.d mess strikes back

[Andrew Reilly]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 01:25:22PM -0700, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <2fd864e0903020512i22b2c31fg487aaf37fed6398b at mail.gmail.com>
>             Astrodog <astrodog at gmail.com> writes:
> : As unfortunate (and annoying) as that delay was, your system was in a
> : "defined" state, at the end of rc.d. As things stand now, that doesn't
> : appear to be the case anymore, and I think that may be a more
> : significant issue than the delay.
> 
> I'd be happy with synchronous dhcp.

The more general problem is the (large) number of network
applications that assume that network addresses and routes never
change (because that's how things were when they were written.)
My personal pet peeve is ntpd, but there are many others.  Any
daemon that caches host IP address information at startup is
(IMO) broken, and needs to be fixed.  There are many reasons why
network addresses may change *after* startup, and it is not
reasonable to go around and manually HUP everything when that
happens.

Needing synchronous DHCP as a work-around here is just the
signifier of the problem: it isn't the over-all solution.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew