[Bug 311957] [NEW] Please enable support for dummy interfaces

[Tuomas Jormola]

Public bug reported:

It would be quite beneficial if dhcp3 server supported Linux dummy
ethernet devices by default. For example I would like to use dummy
interface on a virtualization host to provide net install and/or LTSP
services for virtual machines. This requires working PXE booting setup,
which requires DHCP server in the subnet. A clean way to implement this
is to add a dummy interface on the server and configure virtualized
network interfaces on the virtual machines that are bridged to the dummy
interface on the host and have the host services (DHCP, TFTP etc.)
listen the bridged dummy interface.

Using of dummy interfaces is explicitly disabled in the DHCP server
source. The behavior can only be toggled during build time. It's
controlled by the macro SKIP_DUMMY_INTERFACES in includes/cf/linux.h.
That definition should be commented out.

The actual code that skips dummy interfaces only checks if the name of
the interface begins with the string 'dummy'. Thus one can work-around
this problem by renaming the interfaces provided by the dummy ethernet
driver by editing udev rules. However, this is not very nice thing to
do. And neither is the decision by maintainers of ISC DHCP just blindly
ignore all interfaces with some string of their choosing in the name of
the interface. Since the administrator has already mechanism to limit
DHCP server to use only those interfaces that are wanted, this kind of
arbitrary limitation by the software should go away.

Existing Debian bug report of this problem and details of the work-
around: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430528

** Affects: dhcp3 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Affects: dhcp3 (Debian)
     Importance: Unknown
         Status: Unknown

** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #430528
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430528

** Also affects: dhcp3 (Debian) via
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430528
   Importance: Unknown
       Status: Unknown

-- 
Please enable support for dummy interfaces
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/311957
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