[clue-tech] DHCP Server and Package Install Date

[David L. Anselmi]

David L. Willson wrote:
> How do I determine which DHCP server leased my address to me, without looking at
> anything but my own machine?  Earlier, I had a machine that had a bad address, but I
> blamed the wrong host for issuing the bad address.  I could have saved some time by
> knowing which host issued the address.

You shouldn't have multiple DHCP servers on the same subnet, the 
protocol doesn't allow it (where are they at with failover, anyway?) 
There's something to be said for paying attention to what you've done 
and what you're doing.

You can run multiple servers on multiple subnets on the same LAN segment 
but you have to be pretty careful.  And even without DHCP that's the 
road to madness so don't do it.  (Unless you're a big time VLAN guy, 
maybe they get used to doing that.)

As Peter said the DHCP server gets logged when the lease is granted (and 
ipconfig shows it right to you on Windows).  If you have machines 
sharing IP addresses, that's bad too.  Then you have to differentiate by 
MAC but your arp table only shows the latest entry.

> How do I find out the order or times of package installations on my machine?  All
> weekend, I've been using imapsync, which has an unstated dependency on
> libdate-manip-perl.

You're kidding, right?  Life is too short to deal with "unstated 
dependencies".  Use something that isn't junk.

I should get a blog.  Then I could put a rant up about how important it 
is to keep track of how things work when other people have to use your 
stuff.  Einstein didn't have to remember his phone number because it was 
easy to look up.  But that's only because someone bothered to write it 
down for him.  (I have a feeling about how dependency management makes 
or breaks distros, but that goes on the blog.)

> I wanted to transfer the job to another machine, but I couldn't
> remember the unstated dependency.  I could have saved time and a failed run of imapsync,
> by just asking my system, "What did I install right after I installed imapsync?" but I
> couldn't figure out how to ask that.

aptitude and dpkg keep logs of what they do.  Of course logs tend to get 
rotated out but I seem to have dpkg logs almost a year old.

> Ok geeks, ring in when ready.
> 
> Dave, I'm sorry, I'm burning two questions that would have been good ones for the "geek
> tournament".

If you try to grade this I won't answer any more questions. :-)

Dave