“He’s dead, Jim.” Dr. McCoy
DHCP is dead; long live DHCP.
Yes, the end-of-life announcement for ISC DHCP means that the ISC will no longer provide official support or updates for the software. Our ever-faithful, omnipresent friend — the familiar dhcpd daemon — is retiring, albeit over a really long walk to that cabin in the mountains. While the software will continue to function, it will become increasingly vulnerable to breakage, security vulnerabilities, and other issues over time as the software ages.
Not that it isn’t time. ISC DHCP is really mature code (think “frangible”), meaning it’s really hard to refactor it for things like unit tests and instrumentation. Ever tried putting a debug print in DHCP code? I have. It can be incredibly tricky to even log things. Like the famous “clean code” example of the disconnecting FAX program that was “cured” by adding a diagnostic printf, DHCP code also suffers from a nasty sensitivity to timing issues —…
