Curious lease to/from Apple DHCP Client

Sten Carlsen sten at s-carlsen.dk
Wed Aug 2 17:04:46 UTC 2006


I experienced my problems with 10.2. I used 300 seconds for lease time,
this is quite workable I had a couple of linux hosts and a couple of
windows 2000 clients running off this configuration when I added the
MAC. This is very similar to what I saw, probably identical but I do not
remember all details from then.

Could you tell us what system the offending host is running? It should
be possible to trace it down given you have the mac adress.

In OSX 10.2 I have not found any way to turn this feature off.

I have saved a mail from Simon Hobson (Quote):

There is a draft document suggesting the reservation of .local for 
link local names and multicast dns : 
http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt

Section 3.2 says :


> >Operators setting up private
> >    internal networks ("intranets") are advised that their lives may be
> >    easier if they avoid using the suffix ".local." in names in their
> >    private internal DNS server. Alternative possibilities include:
> >
> >       .intranet
> >       .internal
> >       .private
> >       .corp
> >       .home
>   


There's more about Zeroconf at http://www.zeroconf.org/

Rendevous is no longer used by Apple as a result of an agreement with 
someone else who was already using that name. Apple now officially 
call it Bonjour, though of course there's lots of historical stuff 
that won't get changed.



Simon Hobson wrote:
> Didier Benza wrote:
>
>   
>> Sten Carlsen wrote :
>>     
>>>  This is exactly the pattern I observed when I first connected my (then)
>>>  brand new MAC to my network; during the next week and using far too much
>>>  time I found that the only cure was to switch from an internal tld of
>>>  ".local" to something else ".home". Apple uses .local for some other
>>>  purpose and things go very wrong.
>>>
>>>       
>
>
>
>   
>> Joerg Mayer wrote :
>>     
>>>  On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 06:27:34PM +0200, Sten Carlsen wrote:
>>>  
>>>  Just FYI: .local is a special domainname, see:
>>>  http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt
>>>  More on this topic:
>>>  http://dotlocal.org/
>>>
>>>       
>
>
>
>   
>> Thanks to you both for your answers. I have heard of ZeroConf in a
>> conference, but I didn't see anything relating to this strange DHCP
>> comportment...
>> I am not a MacOs geek :-[ ,  the .local tld seem to be only the emerged
>> part of an iceberg... Do you know if there is a mean to deactivate
>> ZeroConf on a Mac and if it solves this curious behaviour ?
>>     
>
>
> As I write this, I'm using 10.4 and plugged into a network with a 
> .local domain - it seems to be 'standard practice' in the Windoze 
> world to set stuff up as .local unless there's a real domain name to 
> use. I've not observed any funny behaviour with DHCP - but I did note 
> that in your original logs there were 60 second leases being offered 
> which may be a clue as that's far too short for a workable system.
>
> AFAIK it's not possible (or at least easy) to disable zeroconf 
> altogether, and it wouldn't be advisable anyway as so much relies on 
> it.
>
> AIUI, the main issue is that you can't resolve domain names to 
> addresses in the local domain. There are some tech notes about it 
> somewhere, but with 10.4 it's apparently solvable by putting "local" 
> in the Search Domains box of network settings (for previous versions 
> it's a lot more involved).
>
> Simon
>
>   

-- 
Best regards

Sten Carlsen

No improvements come from shouting:

       "MALE BOVINE MANURE!!!" 



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