Subject: Re: Feedback requested (re MDHCP)

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 1998 10:59:26 -0500

> Ralph Droms tells me that this is where the real DHCP implementors hang
> out. Last week, I sent the following email to the dhcp-v4 list and have
> received very little response. I would greatly appreciate any input you
> folks could provide.

I did read that, and didn't respond because I don't have a strong
opinion, and I feel that too many weak opinions, occasionally
including my own, are offered that simply add to the general noise
level in the IETF.

However, since Ralph hasn't seen any responses, I'll do what I can,
based on what you've said in your message.  Please understand that I
haven't read the MDHCP draft, and don't have time to, so if you see
errors in the following statement, that's why.

From what you've said, you've removed irrelevant fields from the DHCP
packet.  This shouldn't make much difference.  I don't know if you've
changed the option format, or just the meanings of the codes.  If the
former, the benefits of code sharing are probably pretty small.  If
the latter, perhaps not so small.  The meat of the DHCP code is the
address allocation code, which is going to be somewhat different for
MDHCP than for DHCP anyway, so that was going to have to be tweaked
regardless.  The next biggest piece of the code is the option
processing code, but at least in the case of the ISC server, that is
fairly generic, so changing the meaning of the option codes doesn't
prohibit code sharing.

The code that drives the sequencing of the protocol is actually
trivial, at least in the server, because really it's the client that
drives the protocol.  So making changes to that really doesn't have
any significant impact on code sharing.   Making similar changes in
the client would be harder, but still not very hard, IMHO.

I suspect that the Internet Software Consortium DHCP server could
currently be hacked to support MDHCP, but nobody's asked me for it or
offered patches, so I'm not sure that matters.  FYI, I am willing to
accept such changes if offered, and if they're clean, and I'm willing
to work with MDHCP people who need guidance in how to make the
changes.

Hopefully this tells you what can be shared.   I leave it to you to
figure out whether or not it's worth it... :')

			       _MelloN_