Startup sequence

[Simon Hobson]

Chris Miller wrote:

>Apparently there is no provision for the interface to come up in the case
>where no dhcp server can be found.  I find that difficult to believe and I
>would prefer to believe that I have misconfigured something.  It seems like
>it should come up provisionally and continue to broadcast "DHCPDISCOVER"s.


the he wrote:

>I've stumbled onto what I think is a pretty good solution.
>
>I set the following values in /etc/sysconfig/newwork-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
>BOOTPROTO=static
>IPADDR=10.1.2.254
>NETMASK=255.255.255.255
>
>Reboot...
>Net comes up.  Check.
>dhcpd comes up. Check.
>
>. and I added "dhclient eth0" in rc.local, which configures the port
>according to my dhcpd database.
>
>I'm pleased with the simplicity and apparent reliability.

After your first message I was about to write back and suggest that 
you appear to be using dhcp to configure itself, and this is the 
first time I've heard of someone trying this.

Then you confirmed it.

I find myself asking why you want to go through all these hoops when 
you can (and in fact have found out, MUST) also configure it 
manually. It creates all sorts of issues, like :

If you don't configure /etc/resolv.conf then you can't resolve and 
dns names in your dhcpd config, and therefore dhcpd can't start, so 
you can't configure resolv.conf by dhcp - and probably a few other 
dependencies as well.


Naturally, the dhcp server cannot start if it cannot determine what 
subnet it is in - without that information it is not able to function 
correctly.