Bug#236533: I am confused

[Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl>]

Hello Thomas, Josh,

Ahh. I think I now see the root of the confusion.
With my setup DHCP does _not_ fail the first time it is tried, as seems to be 
assumed in the code. It succeeds within the first 20% of the progress bar and 
I get a perfectly usable lease for the first stage setup.
After that d-i notices I still don't have a hostname, so it offers 'debian' as 
default (which I change), after which d-i happily continues the installation 
_without_ DHCP being tried again.
(The domainname is set correctly to 'fjphome.nl' as offered by the DHCP 
server.)

So, what I would like to see is 'Write "send host-name <host-name>"' added to 
dhclient.conf either at (1) or at (2) as indicated in code below (using 
hostname as host-name ;-)

In fact, I'm not sure that the 'else' branch to the first 'if' really adds 
something: why would a DHCP-request with send host-name succeed if the first 
try without one fails? However, it can't hurt either and I don't see anything 
wrong with the code, but in my mind it's main function is just another retry.

I agree that host-name can be different from hostname. I don't think there is 
a situation in which sending a host-name to the server would do any harm, so 
I think (2) would be the correct location.

I've pasted an example of the lease I get at the bottom of this message.

The lease I get returned _after_ (manually) adding 'send host-name 
"<host-name>"' is exactly the same (I think this indicates that the server 
has accepted the proposed host-name), but having the client send it means the 
DHCP-server is able to dynamically add the host-name in my DNS server (and so 
enabling me to ping <host-name>.fjphome.nl from other boxes in the network).

Hope this helps.

Frans

On Thursday 24 June 2004 15:00, Thomas Hood wrote:
> I think that we should stop calling the argument of "send host-name"
> a "hostname".  Instead let's call it a "host-name".  The host-name
> can be different from the hostname.  See #239591.
>
>     Try DHCP
>     If DHCP succeeded {
>         If a hostname is returned {
>             Ask the user for a hostname with the returned hostname
>             as the default.
>         } else {
>             Ask the user for a hostname with "debian"
>             as the default.
              (1) <========
>         }
>         Write hostname to /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts
          (2) <=======
>     } else {
>         Ask the user for a host-name
>         Try DHCP with "send host-name <host-name>"
>         If DHCP succeeded {
>             Write "send host-name <host-name>" to dhclient.conf that
>             gets used after reboot
>             If a hostname is returned {
>                 Ask the user for a hostname with the returned hostname
>                 as the default.
>             } else {
>                 Ask the user for a hostname with <host-name>
>                 as the default.
>             }
>         Write hostname to /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts
>         }
>     }

Example of lease during 1st stage setup
=======================================
lease {
  interface "eth0";
  fixed-address 10.19.66.32;
  option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
  option routers 10.19.66.1;
  option domain-name-servers 10.19.66.2,10.19.66.1;
  option domain-name "fjphome.nl";
  option dhcp-lease-time 1800;
  option dhcp-message-type 5;
  option dhcp-server-identifier 10.19.66.2;
  renew 4 2004/6/24 22:02:52;
  rebind 4 2004/6/24 22:14:07;
  expire 4 2004/6/24 22:17:52;
}