On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 04:25:48PM -0400, James Carlson wrote: > > Out of curiosity: does the protocol (DHCP) even support this?? > > Yes. The client can request a particular lease time, and can do it > whenever it wants.
Cool, thanks. > Unfortunately, the server is not required to go along with the > client's suggestion, so your alternative (if the server didn't agree) > would be to just drop off the net anyway. But they generally do, yes? > > I think the argument against the above is that it's one thing to allow a > > pathological situation to exist in presumably-rare accidents, and > > another to do it by design. My point was that your worry seemed a bit > > overwrought and I wanted to see how far it went :) > > > > That dhcpagent is part of the OS is irrelevant; of course dhcpagent can > > fail. The whole self-healing philosophy is to react usefully in the > > face of failures. > > There are at least a few of us who are somewhat dubious of that > prospect. > > It probably makes operational sense to put some unreliable services > under a restarter (if you have no alternative to fix the service), but > from a design perspective, it just seems like darned poor engineering > to relaunch a process and hope things go better this time around. > > "Self-healing" makes sense if you can reconfigure yourself to deal > with a failure. I don't think it makes as much sense if you keep > trying something that's broken. Sometimes, a deterministic machine > actually needs a deterministic fix. ;-} Self-healing was primarily about hardware faults, I know. I was not arguing that we need a timebomb in case dhcpagent is buggy. Rather, I was probing the extent of your discomfort with the system continuing to use a leased address past lease expiration. _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
