Comment 26 for bug 10239

Package: dhcp3-client
Followup-For: Bug #151820

I ran into this recently. I was trying to get the dhcp3 server to do
dynamic updates of DNS. The server doesn't even try if it doesn't get
a hostname, and the default Debian configuration doesn't send it.
Windows2000 server does, so it seems to work better with Linux than
Linux!

I've asked on the dhcp list (which recently merged server and client
lists) whether the client is expected to supply the hostname. So far,
no answer (I did kind of bury the question).

The way the dhcp3d.conf man page is written there is no mention of the
fact that dynamic DNS updates will not be attempted if there is no
hostname (though it makes sense, in retrospect). This might indicate
that the name is expected.

Also, there is a lot of code associated with the dhcp3-client that
gets the hostname (/etc/dhcp3/dhclient-script I think, though I'm not
on the system that has it right now). I couldn't tell exactly what
the intended purpose was, but if that's supposed to be sending the
hostname to the dhcp server, it isn't working. Or, maybe the script
isn't invoked by default (though the comments in the conf file seem to
imply it is).

Minimally, it would be nice to document the fact that the default
config doesn't send the hostname, explain how to change that, and list
the consequences of not sending the hostname.

Is there a security reason not to send the hostname?

Note this is talking about getting the dhcp3 server to make the
request to update DNS, not having the client do so directly (241388's
subject, though that bug mentions in passing the need to explicitly
set configurations on the client to get the serve to do the updates).

If the client code that I mentioned earlier is
intended to update DNS directly, it may be relevant that doing some
probably requires some intervention from the user, like setting a
shared secret to allow the updates to happen.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27advncdfs
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)