--- On Mon, 1/4/10, Andrew Pollock <apoll...@debian.org> wrote:
> What is supposed to happen when the DHCP administrator
> wants to roll out a
> change to the default route?
>
> I think at best I could add what you're asking for only in
> the case of
> initial lease acquisition and not renewal. Even then, I
> suspect this is
> going to surprise people who expect or rely on the current
> behaviour.
>
> I think for your particular case, it might be best to use a
> custom DHCP
> client hook, which goes and explicitly removes the default
> route provided by
> DHCP.
I didn't notice any code in the script in question to remove the prior default
route, before adding a new one. Based on what I've seen, the existing code
would actually create a bug if the admin changed the route, because there would
be two different default routes in the routing table. Perhaps the kernel keeps
it straight when the same network device is set as a default route. I'd suggest
that creating two different default routes isn't a good thing, or a feature one
would want to preserve.
Is there any case where one would want two default routes? It seems a rather
odd/confusing feature. If a system has two interfaces both using DHCP, both
could end up setting default routes, which is exactly what happens on my
systems with the current script (I get two default routes).
Assuming you know more than I do (since I recognize your name from 10+ years of
using Linux) - at the very least, the debian /etc/default directory should have
a switch to control the behavior of creating a default route (with the switch
defaulted to the existing behavior). I think what I'm doing is very logical
and desirable, as I previously explained. It should qualify as an excellent
(yet very simple) improvement to debian, which would simply mean changing the
priority of this bug.
If you wouldn't mind, could you explain why one would want two default routes
in the kernel? If the kernel failed over gracefully (oops, didn't get an ack to
the packet or opening the connection, try the other default route...) I
wouldn't even have noticed this problem.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
