2y ago

ISC DHCP Client and Relay End of Maintenance

www.isc.org

The Internet Systems Consortium has stopped maintaining their DHCP client, which is standard on a lot of distros.
Debian has updated its documentation and now warns users to choose an alternative:

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/isc-dhcp-client

On Debian Unstable, I was already forced to uninstall it in yesterday's upgrade.
If you're using network-manager, you don't need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.

On Arch, this concerns the dhcpd package:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dhcpd

30 comments

The Arch wiki article already states it's unmaintained since January 2023. So Arch users have had almost a year to find another solution at this point.
- I posted mainly because Debian now seems to force a switch in Unstable and many distros rely on its packages.
On Arch, the client is in the dhclient package, which is generally also the name of the ISC DHCP client binary.
dhcpcd (DHCP Client Daemon) is not affiliated with the ISC and still appears to be under active development.
- I mentioned dhcpd (the ISC DHCP server demon), not dhcpcd, the unaffiliated DHCP Client demon.
  
  Yes; I wanted to mention that dhcpcd is not affected because the title explicitly mentions the DHCP client (dhclient), so people might go looking for alternative DHCP clients in the comments.
  I think it’s a bit confusing that you mentioned the DHCP client (dhclient) and DHCP relay (dhrelay) in the title, then link to the Arch Wiki article about the DHCP server (dhcpd). Yes, dhrelay is contained in the dhcpd package (dhclient, however, is not), but I assume most people will be using a DHCP client and few will be operating a DHCP server or relay.
If you're using network-manager, you don't need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.
So... every GNOME and KDE Distro is unaffected? Other Desktops too?
- Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they? Plasma will happily show information about connections managed by something else than NetworkManager, but won't be able to manage them itself. But desktop distributions will most likely ship it as it covers basically all use cases.
  
  Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they?
  Not directly, but distros may choose to create a dependency.
  On Debian, installing recommended dependencies is enabled by default and disabling them can lead to all sorts of errors and missing functionality.
  gnome-shell recommends gnome-control-center, which recommends network-manager-gnome, which depends on network-manager.
  So unless you go out of your way to install a very minimal system, it gets pulled in.
  
  Okay thanks. Makes sense that way. But de facto most Distros will ship it.
- Other DEs should use network manager as well. I've tested this at least on MATE, XFCE, as well as Cinnamon.
  This is not a guarantee, tho, as users can pretty much install whatever they want.
  
  Except for parts of it that are broken
This article is from July 2021. Why exactly are you sharing this?
- When I updated Debian Unstable 2 days ago, it forced me to uninstall isc-dhcp-client in order to upgrade network-manager.
  So I looked up the reason and found the ISC's blog post. I shared it here thinking it might be interesting to some, since Debian's packages are the basis for a lot of other distros that might be affected soon.
  
  Okay, fair point, so it is relevant for a current issue
And here I was thinking people were about to move to systemd-networkd so network would actually work decently on the Linux desktop and then I remembered that GNOME comes with the bs called network-manager.
- And here I'm wondering when systemd-desktopd will replace Gnome.
  
  That's gonna be a good day. I'm sure they'll have the common sense to include systemd-desktopd-iconsd and systemd-desktopd-slow-transition-animationsd will be optional. :P
- God i hate network manager and the vpnc plugin specifically. Its been broken for almost 2 years. You cannot add a vpnc vpn in network manager.
  
  What's broken? I just added a vpnc connection on my machine (granted can't test it since I have nothing to connect to) but there was a vpnc connection profile until I deleted it.
- I use both depending on the device. My desktop at home and all servers use systemd-networkd and I'm very happy with it. Right now, I'm on vacation and NetworkManager comes in very helpful with the ability to quickly manage networks as a normal user with a graphical user interface.
  
  Question is: why can't the GNOME people that are so eager to reinvent everything dedicate a few bucks out of their new 1M€ funding and integrate it with systemd-networkd and ditch the old NetworkManager for good. That thing is inconsistent and to make things worse now we've the "new network settings" with some settings and then the NetworkManager window/GUI with more settings and things are as coherent as Windows 10's new Settings vs Control Panel... Fucks sake GNOME.
  For what's worth in Windows I can pull the old Control Panel Network Connections settings go into properties and manage everything network adapters have to over with a simple tab based navigation. In GNOME right now it is a shit show of jumping around between the GNOME Settings and the older NetworkManager GUI to end up not being able to easily get a VLAN tag on some connection.

30 comments