Tilman Linneweh wrote:

Sorry for not getting back on this before, it was not of ignorance but lack of time. I mentioned two problems that I thought were related:

a) Starting dhclient for one device will reset all other devices configured by dhclient.

This problem has been solved with the new dhclient from OpenBSD.

b) Starting dhclient will reset the device, if it was previosly configured, before getting a lease.

This is a problem for diskless operation where the root device is nfs mounted. In that case the diskless client looses the mount and hangs. This has not been solved.

This may not be a bug, but rather a documentation problem.

According to the documentation of the new dhclient, the -l option allows to specify a different location for the lease file. I have tried specifying a memory disk device but this does not solve the problem.

The old dhclient had an option -n which should force dhclient not to reset the interface and rather get a renewed lease. The option didn't work as mentioned in the original pr. The new dhclient does not support such behaviour.

On one hand, it makes sense that dhclient should not be used for diskless clients since these will never change ip.

But on the other hand, it is well documented (including the FreeBSD documentation) how to use dhcp to pass on client configuration parameters with the dhcp reponse (in particular mounts for /var, /tmp and swap, which must be client specific).

Work around:

Strictly one do not need dhclient for diskless operation, the system is alive and kicking, so post boot configuration parameters could centrally be mananged in some LDAP directory say, and passed by other means. I have not gone into this yet.

If dhcp configuration of diskless clients will no longer be supported then please pass on this note to the doc-project.

Best regards, Erik