Virginia Wray wrote: > On 02/11/09 09:04, Dave Miner wrote: >> Volker A. Brandt wrote: >>>> I took a look at ISC DHCP last week and found it quite easy to use. >>>> I've >>>> set up AI configurations quite a few times, and everytime I do, I run >>>> into all kinds of problems with the Sun DHCP set up. >>> Hmmm... what kind of problems are you seeing? While the Sun DHCP >>> server is not the world's most user-friendly program, it does what >>> it's supposed to do. >>> >> I'm looking for some more detail on that, too. >> >>> A more interesting question would be the fate of Sun DHCP as a whole. >>> It has a number of shortcomings, most notably the lack of a more modern >>> data backend, e.g. LDAP or a local SQL database. >>> >> The API for data backends is published and available for anyone to >> write to [1]. At one time we had a prototype Oracle backend, but that >> never reached completion. I see little likelihood that Sun would >> spend resources to add backends at this time. >> >> Its overall fate is a topic for discussion in the networking >> community. But the installadm tools will need to support the Sun >> server in order to be used on Solaris 10 or any earlier releases we >> choose to support, and ISC will be required to support Linux servers, >> so we'll be somewhat agnostic on this point, anyway. >> >> [1] http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806-6829?l=en >> >> Dave > Volker is correct. From what I've experienced, Sun DHCP does what it's > supposed to do once everything is set up, and the problems I've run into > do relate to usability. I'll also be the first to admit that I'm a > novice when it comes to working with this technology. From my > experience, the issues appear to be different with each set up. I can > think of one example off the top of my head. On one occasion I ran > dhcpconfig -U -x to unconfigure a previously configured set up, but not > everything got unconfigured, for some reason. There were still some > artifacts of the configuration that somehow didn't get removed. Then, > when I went to set up another dhcp server, I had problems getting things > set up because of the artifacts. Being a novice, it was difficult for > me to troubleshoot the problem. >
That particular failure is surprising to me; if you have any way of duplicating what happened, please get a bug filed. I agree that there are certain assumptions in how dhcpconfig and DHCP Manager approach initial setup which can be very problematic in some cases; the need to define netmasks info is usually the one that trips people up and is a longstanding bug that I wish I'd had time to fix. Philosophically, they're not that different from Caiman, in that the idea is to get you something that's likely to at least minimally work in common environments and let you customize from there. That usually works well for people new to a task, but can be really problematic when the assumptions they make get in the way. Dave
