dhclient and dhcp update require restart?

[David Cantrell]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thu, 27 Aug 2009, Matthew Woehlke wrote:

> Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:
>> Hi, something that bothers me a bit... More and more system restart 
>> requests with each update (even if one doesn't use the package at the 
>> time).
>
> This is a real shame. One of the selling points of Linux is that you *don't* 
> need to reboot for every little upgrade (unlike a certain other OS I shan't 
> name).
>
>> Is this necessary for dhclient and dhcp update packages to require restart?
>> Wouldn't "service network restart" and "service dhcpd restart" in the 
>> install/upgrade
>> scripts do the trick (after checking that the service is actually running)?
>> Ssh used to do that since, well, as far as I remember.
>
> Yes, please. Though maybe with prompting; we shouldn't go restarting 
> possibly-critical services without good warning.
>
> As David said, for dhcpd, 'service restart dhcpd' should be fine. For 
> dhclient I would question why /any/ restart is needed. If your dhcp 
> connection is currently established, is dhclient even running? And even if it 
> is, what benefit do you get cycling the interface /now/, if the new dhclient 
> takes over whenever the interface cycles anyway?

This is a limitation of the updates system, at least to my knowledge.  I
submit updates based on package builds, but cannot set things like 'suggests
reboot' on a per subpackage basis.  Since dhclient is a subpackage of dhcp,
and I flag needs reboot for the dhcp package, dhclient inherits that.

But I explained in the previous reply how to cycle the interface using either
the network service or NetworkManager.  I still view this as something more
technical users will be familiar with and for the average user, simply
rebooting the system is the easiest method.

- -- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkqYYQ0ACgkQ5hsjjIy1VkmmAQCgyTlzwMUifVgU4xYYdKbeCZJS
A9UAoKO1pnjuM82JLy3+gYxL8T0/Sxgn
=O/sd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----