On 02/12/09 04:17, 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.
The one thing that I had problem with on Sun DHCP is that it requires that network information correctly reflects current network configuration. If something Sun DHCP relies on is misconfigured or missing, it just doesn't work. Maybe this is only specific to my AI configuration, since I run AI server on my laptop which I connect to different networks. When connected to different network, I have to reconfigure addresses of DNS servers set up in DHCP macros (this is actually needed for AI client, not DHCP server itlsef) and make sure than netmasks are correct (as Dave already pointed out) and hostname is correctly resolved to IP address - I take care of this by editing /etc/inet/hosts file. What I like on Sun DHCP is that from my experience it behaves in predictable and reproducible way. Once I determined what I have to do, the same set of steps always worked. As far as usability point of view is concerned, Sun DHCP is not as user friendly as it could be, but once one gets used to its philosophy, it can be managed. That said, with respect to AI, I don't think that this aspect is the one of the highest priorities here, since I think that AI itself should take care of DHCP set up and hide this from user. In cases, when manual intervention is required, user should be provided with exact procedure, how to do it, or maybe with some kind of script should be generated which user would then just run. As I don't have deeper experience with ISC DHCP, I can't compare - this is one of things on my TODO list :-) Jan
