On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 11:48 -0400, Dan Williams wrote: > On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 10:26 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: > > Yeah, and the other headache in IPv4 is lack of autoconfiguration: you > > need a dhcp server for two machines to talk to each other. If we want > > to clone systems from nearby kids, this then means a dhcp server, and > > all that rot. > > What about self-assigned IP4 addresses? That's pretty standard in all 3 > major OSes, and there's a well-defined process to come up with one. You > essentially pick an address at random from the 169.xxx.xxx.xxx range, > and send out some packets to see if anyone else has it. If somebody > does, you pick a new address and repeat. > > We're already going to ship Avahi for userspace, and it can do this just > fine. For the BIOS side of things, this should be trivial to implement > as the state machine is quite simple.
I took a peek at avahi's source, and I have a few questions/issues: ARP is used to determine whether an IP is in use. That means any IP addresses that aren't on the local link but are routable may conflict w/ the chosen IP. Will that be a problem? It looks like it uses rand() to get an IP address, seeded from /dev/urandom and time(). rfc3927 describes (in section 2.1) using the MAC address to seed its PRNG. Does LB make /dev/urandom available? Do we even want to consider using that? Why not use the MAC address? How long would we be waiting for an ARP probe to timeout? _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
