Re: [dhcwg] Comments on draft-ietf-dhc-3315id-for-v4-03

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 11:28:34AM -0700, Ted Lemon wrote:
> You have ISP customers that do PXE booting on behalf of customers?   I 
> am now deeply confused.

I'm sorry, you have every right to be confused, my mind jumped here
halfway through the conversation and I never made mention of this.

I shouldn't have mentioned it, it's not important to this
discussion.

But it's an amusing story nonetheless.

A lone geek at a small ISP trying to horn in on the broadband space.
She has an arrangement with the last-mile supplier so that she gets
DHCP relays installed in every customer-prem.

She limits the number of leases to a fixed number per each relay-agent
id suboption.  Customers pay more for more leases.

Now imagine that one of the two following cases starts happening.

1) A misconfigured boot-order, or a system with an unusual (not IDE,
some kinda add-in card that maybe only gets tried in boot order because
the 'boot other devices' option set to enabled in the bios) arrangement
as a hard drive, results in having 'network' on its boot-order before
the hard drive in question.  PXE will try to boot, fail, then boot the
system on the hard drive.  This might be repeated for multiple network
interfaces, if any, but hopefully the customer doesn't have them all
plugged in.

2) A person with PXE clients at home has failed to segregate the
broadcast domain of their broadband connection's set-top box with
their pxe clients and the DHCP server they rely upon.  The PXE
client boots from the local dhcpd, then later from the ISP's,
but her DHCP server still sends out OFFERs.

Now imagine the lease limitation is full once the all the customer's
systems are online.

But the extra lease OFFERed to the PXE client means they are denied
booting before all their systems are up.

When I said "ISP's using our software", I should have just left it
at "users of", since I don't actually know from where the patches
came.  I just know that they're out there, and people are using it
(and being guided to use it)...it's just that this ISP thing latched
into my memory at that moment and I wasn't exercising enough
restraint at the keyboard.

Sorry about that, common disease for me I'm afraid.

> As far as talking your mother through it,
> when would you ever want to talk your mother through setting up a
> diskless boot client?

I was specifically referring to 'setting and unsetting the client
identifier' for reasons that are now hopefully somewhat less muddy.

There are lines in the sand everywhere as to whose burden it is to
bear support costs.  So long as the answer is 'regedit', the burden
of support is too great a cost for people to choose to bear.

-- 
David W. Hankins		"If you don't do it right the first time,
Operations Engineer			you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.		-- Jack T. Hankins