DHCP discovery of WINS servers

[Shirish Kalele]

I agree that using DHCPdiscover is not really kosher.

However, even DHCPdiscover cannot imply address allocation. DHCP servers
need to get a valid response to their offer to confirm that the client
accepted an address it offered. Since nmbd sends no such response, and since
DHCP is based on UDP, servers are usually prepared to handle such behaviour
(per RFC and a bit of testing). The offered address might go into the
unofferable pool for a little while, but will be available again after no
response is received to the offer.

So it seemed like doing DHCPdiscover if DHCPinform fails was harmless and
covered more cases considering the number of old DHCP servers out there.

Again, this could also be a fine tuning option in smb.conf if required.

- SK

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Life is what's happening while you're busy planning for it. - Unknown


> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I don't know how desirable this functionality is, but here's a patch
that
> > uses DHCP to have Samba dynamically discover WINS servers to use (when
> > 'wins server = dhcp' is specified in smb.conf). This can be a nice
option
> > to have in some situations..
> >
> > The patch (and included files) work with 2.0.10 and the 2.2 branch.
>
> I like it.  This is the kind of thing we need for seemless intergration
> into many network environments.
>
> My only worry is the use of DHCPdiscover.  I'm happy with using
> DHCPinform, as that cannot imply address allocation, but a DHCPdiscover
> based setup could allocate addresses and really confuse the admin.  (I
> know that this means we will fail older DHCP servers, but I'm much
> happier with it that way.  ISC DHCPd 3.0 has supprorted it for ages, and
> is now in Release Candidate.   I'm not sure about MS's server)
>
> Andrew Bartlett
>
> --
> Andrew Bartlett
> abartlet at pcug.org.au
> abartlet at samba.org
>