Michael S. Peek said:
If I attempt to set up my own DHCP server then I run into a race condition between my DHCP server and the campus DHCP server. There's no way to tell d-i which server to contact, so it'll listen to the first one that it hears back from. So as near as I can tell, there is just no way to make this work.
The DHCP protocol has the "Vendor Class Identifier" which could ne incoperated into the d-i dhcp-client. The dhcp protocol and many (good) clients allow multiple dhcp servers. The debian-installer dhcp client sends a vendor-class-identifier of "d-i". The debian-installer dhcp client SHOULD be configurable to only accept dhcp leases which come from servers that send a reply containing a vendor-class-identifier of "d-i". If d-i is using dhclient then an /etc/dhclient.conf with a "select-timeout" line and a "require" line should enable this functionality if I have read the man page right. It is a shame that http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apbs02.html B.2.5 seems to say that d-i overloads the dhcp filename option to find the location of the preseed file. In my opinion this is better handled using vendor-encapsulated-options. Check out sun solaris install docs for ideas on this front! Mind you I guess there are many "simple" dhcp servers out there thus making overloading the filename option more practical. Hmm... I think there was some talk of changing the dhcpclient engine for lenny... there seemed to be lots of suggestions... my vote is for udhcpc. Anyway making the dhcp client in d-i more featureful with regards multiple dhcp servers perhaps could be added as a lenny release goal??? Just some thoughts! Alex Owen