dhclient in 6.0

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: Matt Dawson <matt at mattsnetwork.co.uk>
> Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2006 18:08:02 +0000
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> On Saturday 04 February 2006 12:01, freebsd-stable-request at freebsd.org wrot> e:
> > many aspects of the network interface configuration process
> > were overhauled.
> 
> Which, I suppose, explains the yo-yo effect of my two xe (4) PC Cards,
> amongst others, and why my wi (4) card no longer behaves itself.
> 
> Up-down-up-down-up-down...
> 
> I keep expecting it to either lose weight or make a mess in the slot
> One is a Xircom RealPort, so it's not the "dongle", as is so
> often the case wit> h the CE3s. It works only if I force it to
> 10BaseT, half duplex, even manually configured with ifconfig.
> 
> It's not all bad. ath and ndis cards behave themselves, as do my 3Com
> 905Bs> (if one discounts imp@'s PCI pointy hat of last week - there
> were many dead> rottweilers in my test machine at that point).
> 
> These are small prices to pay for 6.0's goodness. Without a doubt, 6.0
> is t> he best release I have used, bar none, and the WiFi features
> that wpaul@, sam@> et. al. have worked so hard to give us are
> excellent. sos@ deserves a menti> on for the vastly improved ATA
> controller support list that nobody seems to notice, too. FWIW, I did
> think the switch to OpenBSD's dhclient was poorly> thought out, since
> the ISC client did things like DDNS, which I needed. I managed to work
> around the loss of these features, but it still feels like> I've an
> arm missing when configuring interfaces...

If you use a wi card, install the ISC client. It's that simple.

The problem is that the integration of the modern wlan (802.11) code has
never been done in the if_wi code and it does not report state back to
wlan adequately to make the OpenBSD client function correctly.

I know Sam L. has posted that he had a personal promise from someone to
update if_wi, but it never happened. (Sam has declined to state who that
was.) As a result, wlan sees the link drop on a wi card, but never sees
it come back, So dhclient dies (as it should) when the link is lost, but
never restarts when it is restored.

I greatly prefer having dhclient run per interface and, if it understood
what the wi card was doing, it would be great. But that's not the way it
is and, with the declining popularity of Prism2 based cards, it may
never get updated unless someone gets sufficiently annoyed to do the
work themselves.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634