dhcpd and Vista

David W. Hankins David_Hankins at isc.org
Thu Nov 30 20:49:47 UTC 2006


On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 09:18:12PM +0100, Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
> The client issues Discover, the server Offers, and the client says
> nothing until a new Discover, and so on.

Sounds like it isn't receiving the server's offer.

> I've seen it working with another DHCP. That DHCP server gives some more
> fields in the Offer message. Concretely, options 58 and 59
> (dhcp-rebinding-time and dhcp-renewal-time) and something about NetBios.
> I've tried enabling those options 58 and 59 in dhcpd.conf, and even
> though, they are not sent in the Offer packet.

Because the Vista client doesn't put them on the parameter request
list.

You can modify the parameter request list via config syntax if you
really feel compelled to, but I doubt it will be fruitful.

> in dhcp-options(5) there's written that "those options are not user
> configurable".

That's correct, they're calculated at runtime only (the server
checks for the existence of the options in the option cache, and
logs a warning that it's overriding them).

Since the server plays with expiry times under certain circumstances,
it's hard to keep the other times within boundaries if they're
user-configured rather than derived from the lease time.

> Has anybody had success serving a Vista with dhcpd?

I have.  It just worked on the first try for us, same config as
the rest of our systems.  There's nothing remarkable about it.

It looks about like a Windows XP client except that it supplies
option 116, and a vendor-encapsulated-option (option 43) in
its DISCOVER and REQUEST that contains a zero-length option.

I suspect that's going to be a pain some day.  Zero lenth options
are in vogue in DHCPv6, but our DHCPv4 software implementation at
least will treat zero length values the same as non-existence.

-- 
David W. Hankins	"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer		you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.	-- Jack T. Hankins


More information about the dhcp-users mailing list