[Dnsmasq-discuss] HP JetDirect EX Plus

Simon Kelley simon at thekelleys.org.uk
Wed Sep 21 13:53:09 BST 2005


This post is a summary of an off-list conversation. I'm posting it here 
so that it's publically archived and searchable for future reference.

It seems that the DHCP client in the HP JetDirect EX Plus is broken; 
it's demonstrably RFC-noncompliant, and doesn't work with the dnsmasq 
DHCP server. The symptom is a repeating sequence of 
DHCPDISCOVER-DHCPOFFER-DHCPREQUEST-DHCPNAK in the log and no IP address 
assignment.

There is no direct fix, but a workaround takes advantage of the fact 
that the JetDirect attempts to do BOOTP before it does DHCP. Since 
dnsmasq also supports BOOTP, this works, provided that a static IP 
address is associated with the MAC address of the JetDirect, or the 
bootp-dynamic option is enabled in dnsmasq 2.23 or later.

There have been other similar problems with other JetDirect models 
before, but in those cases it was possible to add a workarounds to 
dnsmasq. This is the first Jetdirect DHCP I've come across which was too 
broken to work around.

Cheers,

Simon.



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