[NTLUG:Discuss] AT&T@Home redux

[A.L.]

	The utility 'pump', that ships with RedHat and several other
distributions, is in my experience, badly broken, and won't work with much
of anything outside a Windows or ISC DHCP server, and frequently not even
that well.

	Howerver, the dhcpcd utiltiy which came with RedHat (and probably
any other distro that provides the ISC dhcp* utilities), installed on my
laptop, has worked with at least 4 varietys of cable modems that I can
recall, ISDN routers, M$, Linux, Solaris, and every other DHCP server I've
ever tried to get it working with, and it has NEVER failed to work
flawlessly.  I don't even think about it; it just works.

	As far as the cablemodem issue, I've sometimes had to specify my
hostname like "dhcpcd -h cablemodemhostnamethingy -i eth0" to make it
work, but not always.

	If you are configuring your networking on RedHat (or any other
distro that tries to use 'pump' as it's default DHCP client), with those
nifty little GUI utilities (which really just makes the network startup
scripts call 'pump' to get a DHCP address), you will probably have the
same kinds of problems I keep seeing reported over and over and over again
on mailing lists everywhere.  Place your RedHat disk in your CD-ROM drive,
and type after me:

mount /mnt/cdrom
rpm -ivh /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/dhcpcd*.i386.rpm
dhcpcd -h cablemodemhostnamethingy -i eth0
rpm -e pump

	Just my $0.02 cents.  YMMV.

	--A.L.Lambert