Choosing an open source DHCPv6 client

[Shane Kerr]

Bjørn,

On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 15:57 +0100, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no> writes:
> 
> > Unsupported device type 512 for "ppp0"
> 
> Looks like this is an artifact of the code reuse.  Only Ethernet, Token
> Ring and FDDI interfaces are supported by the common code.  Are there
> any plans for PPP support?  That's an absolute requirement i found so
> obvious I didn't even think of mentioning before.

Hm... our restrictions on interface support come mostly from the IPv4
world. In that universe we have severe restrictions on what we can
support because we have to do funky things to send & receive packets. In
DHCPv6 one has the link-local addresses so one can use plain old
application layer-UDP.

BUT... we do need to get the hardware address (a MAC address in the case
of Ethernet) from the interface in DHCPv6. This address is needed to
make the client identifier (in most cases). Unfortunately there is no
standard way to do this - the API varies on each platform - and so we
have to code up support everywhere. Clearly the code is showing its age,
but it was written for the layer 2 stuff in use at the time. :)

It probably isn't a lot of work to extend this to support PPP, but since
PPP generally does its own IP assignment, there hasn't really been much
call for it.

Do you mind if I forward this to the dhcp-users list? It's probably a
better place for further discussion.

--
Shane