Having Trouble with "set statements =" in omshell Solved

[Martin McCormick]

	The problem turns out to have been multiple syntax issues
which coupled with a lack of documentation about the specific
task at hand made solving it one of the most frustrating things
I have done in a very long time.

My thanks to Wendy Verschoor's omshell man page for its
excellent example of how to dynamically declare a host.  It made
the scripting of how to move all our bootP declarations in to
dynamic declarations a straight-forward operation which was
surprisingly free of glitches.  While our operation hasn't
actually made the move yet, I did get about 8,000 systems to
register on a test system so the process has been test fired so
to speak.

	The groups, however, were something else!!  It turns out
that escaped double quotes do work as in \".  The only thing I
noticed that never quite made sense is that it seems you must
use IP addresses rather than names in next-server statements.
These seem to cause dhcpd to dump core if you use the canonical
name.  Things also blow sky high if you fail to quote file
names. There is an option, not documented anywhere that I can
find which is a CSV list and appears to kill dhcpd if you
accidentally quote it in a group declaration.  An example is:

option dhcp-parameter-request-list 1,3,6,12,15,60,43,44;

	Comma-separated variables like the above example and
name server lists produce very interesting results in
dhcpd.leases.  It is like looking at a DNS zone written by bind
as opposed to one written by dig or a meticulous human.

	We have 12 groups and just about every one of them had
some syntax problem which required a lot of hacking to tease
out.

	I would be more than glad to write some documentation to
fill in the gaps in the best open-source tradition.  What is a
good way to go about this?

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group