Thoughts on dhcp-client automatically determining the hostname?

Andrew Pollock apollock at debian.org
Mon Jan 14 02:46:26 UTC 2008


Hello,

There's been a bug filed against Debian to allow sending the hostname by
default. No big deal, except we'd have to put 'send host-name "foo"' in
dhclient.conf, which would require the dhclient.conf file to be modified at
package install time, once it knows what the user's hostname is.

The full bug details are at http://bugs.debian.org/151820

What happens if the user then changes the hostname? Well now they've got to
go change it in dhclient.conf as well.

I personally don't think it's a terribly good idea to go duplicating such
configuration information more than is necessary.

As someone suggested, why not have a special keyword, "default", that caused
the machine's configured hostname to be used and sent?

Well, the enterprising folks at Ubuntu went ahead and worked up a patch that
did something to this end, and it's at
http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/dhcp3.client-send-hostname.patch

I'm at the point where I'm trying to convince the ISC folks that this patch,
or something in the spirit of this patch, is the way to go.

So I'm here just asking if other users of the DHCP client think that this
sort of feature is a good idea, something they want/need/like etc etc.
Please reply to this email on-list with your thoughts.

regards

Andrew
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