Hi Anthony, first, thanks for the interesting discussion. I played around with our final idea (pre-up.d script which activates autoipd on all interfaces), and it works pretty well, apart from the nasty delay that autoipd takes to start up and get an IP.
I discussed that solution with Lennart Poettering (Avahi upstream, and really clueful). He agreed that this is a possible mode of operation, however, he would not recommend it for the following reasons: - The dhcp plugin mode (dhclient enter/exit hook scripts) is the recommended mode from the RFC. - Always starting avahi-autoipd even on dhcp interfaces is both wasting the daemon on the client and causing unnecessary multicast network traffic in (potentially large) DHCP networks. (Unnecessary DHCP traffic in .local networks is deemed negligible since those nets are usually very small). - The bug history of the zeroconf package taught Lennart to avoid confusing people at all costs. Apparently there were many reports about people not (or mis-)understanding autoipd. - With DHCP, the interface would get a valid IPv4LL address, and immediately afterwards another address (from DHCP). Things like avahi pick up these changes and broadcast them, which might cause confusion at clients using these services. While none of these are strong technical reasons against this way, I the sum of these stops me from introducing this approach by default in Ubuntu's autoipd package. Back to the original point of the bug report, I proposed a new 'ipv4ll' ifupdown method independent from the other methods, since it's a truly new way of bringin up an interface (independent from the fact that it is also applicable as a DHCP plugin). However, if you feel that a 'ipv4ll on' option for an iface with 'manual' method is better, then I'm happy to adopt that approach as well (since the difference is more or less just cosmetical from the user's POV). Wrt to the name, 'zeroconf' is much more than 'ipv4ll', but the latter is much less human-readable, and while wrong and confusing (zeroconf is also a package, which we don't use, and it also comprises dns-sd and mdns) I do not have a strong opinion for either one. Maybe they should just be aliases? Thanks again, and have a nice day, Martin -- Martin Pitt http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com Debian Developer http://www.debian.org In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
