Renee Danson writes:
> I've started to jump into this discussion several times now; but I'm
> very ambivalent about it, and haven't managed to come up with a very
> conclusive statement yet.
>
> I've actually used the "renew lease" button on my mac, and I think
> it was a reasonable action to take given what I'd observed about the
> network I was connecting to. Things generally worked; but maybe one
> out of four times when plugging into it the dns server address would
> be incorrect. My guess is that there were two dhcp servers on the
> network, one of which was not configured correctly. In any case,
In that case, the sort of interface I'd expect would be:
- A top-level "something doesn't seem right here."
- A lower-level (detailed) display showing the conflicting DHCP
server addresses and the parameters provided by each.
- Perhaps a mechanism to filter away a known-rogue server. (Though,
obviously, such a thing should be fixed at the source.)
I don't think that punching a button and hoping the timing comes out
differently on this go-round is a good way to deal with a problem like
that.
> So I've been trying to figure out what would have helped in the
> situation I ran into. What could nwam have done to provide a better
> alternative than a "grasping at straws" hammer, whether of the renew-
> dhcp-lease size or of the larger restart-nwam size. And I haven't
> come up with anything other than fairly complex heuristics that are
> pretty far beyond anything we can fit into phase 1 (noticing that
> two different dhcp servers are handing out addresses on the same
> network, but different dns server information, and one of those
> server addresses isn't responding to dns requests...).
Noticing two different servers would itself be an interesting event.
Noticing that they were providing different information would also be
interesting.
I wouldn't gate this on whether the DNS server addresses (if any)
appeared to be alive. First of all, you can't tell whether something
is "alive" except historically, and secondly, it probably doesn't
matter, because conflicting information is itself a Bad Thing.
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
