dhcprequest function (dhcp: message 4 of 20)

[Kevin Eustice]

> > Am I missing something? Is there some clarification to be made? Is 
> > there a
> > clear statement somewhere including "MUST" or "required" that clearly
> > illustrates the requirement to broadcast NAKs?
> 
> What's going on here is that there are flaws in the RFC that make it 
> somewhat self-contradictory.   Most implementations just do what seems 
> reasonable, and generally interoperate reasonably well, but there have 
> been serious interoperability problems because of imprecise 
> specifications.   In this case, though, I think it's pretty clear what 
> to do.   If you unicast a DHCPNAK directly to a client in the 
> REQUESTING state, you are not following the protocol.

Yet many implementations of DHCP in home routers do just this, as it
speeds up address acquisition when you come in with an invalid
lease. Is there any technical reason why NAK'ing bad REQUESTS is a bad
thing?


-- 
Kevin Eustice
Graduate Student Researcher
The Laboratory for Advanced System Research @ UCLA CS
kfe at cs.ucla.edu
http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/kfe

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so
hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

	--Woody Allen