Bug#236533: I am confused
unmerge 236533
retitle 236533 Please configure dhclient to "send host-name <hostname>"
severity 236533 wishlist
thanks
On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 00:20, Frans Pop wrote:
> 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.
OK, so you don't need to send a host-name to the DHCP server in
order to get a lease.
> 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 default hostname in the prompt should be the one returned via DHCP,
IMHO. I may open a separate bug report to track that issue.
> (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 ;-)
I disagree.
If you don't need a host-name to get a lease before reboot then you
shouldn't need a host-name to get a lease after reboot.
If a host-name isn't needed then no "send host-name" line should be
written to dhclient.conf. The installer should not configure the
system to request a lease in a different way from the way that
was tried and proved successful.
> 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?
Some DHCP servers demand that a magic string be sent as the host-name.
> 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.
Sending a host-name could result in failure to obtain a lease.
Also, sending a host-name requires asking the user for a host-name
prior to attempting to obtain a lease. It is better to skip that
step if a lease can be obtained without asking the user anything.
> 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).
Shouldn't the server be able to add your hostname to DNS without your
client having to request this by requesting the hostname? Sounds like
a peculiarity of your server.
In any case this is something that you can configure locally. I don't
think that the installer should configure dhclient this way by default,
for the reasons given above.
I'd like to mark this "wontfix".
--
Thomas
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