annoying slowdown when using dhcpcd; patch included

[Wicher]

Patch for wicd-1.6.2.1.

By default, dhcpcd (version 4) checks in ARP if the assigned IP address really is available. This causes a very noticable slowdown and is rarely needed. I might bug upstream dhcpcd-maintainers about this but it will probably take a while before they disable this default, if ever.

wicd.log, before patch:
2009/09/03 18:55:03 :: wlan0: acknowledged 192.168.1.106 from 192.168.1.1
2009/09/03 18:55:03 ::
2009/09/03 18:55:03 :: wlan0: checking 192.168.1.106 is available on attached networks
2009/09/03 18:55:03 ::
2009/09/03 18:55:08 :: wlan0: leased 192.168.1.106 for 1800 seconds

wicd.log, after patch:
2009/09/03 19:01:26 :: wlan0: acknowledged 192.168.1.106 from 192.168.1.1
2009/09/03 19:01:26 ::
2009/09/03 19:01:27 :: wlan0: leased 192.168.1.106 for 1800 seconds

It shaves off 5 seconds, that's five seconds of people not staring at wicd-clients' GUI and wondering what could be wrong with their dhcp server ;-)
Entering backend-specific options is not possible in the current GUI, but if that would become supported in the future then obviously that mechanism should be used instead of hardcoding options into wnettools.py .

Cheers, Wicher Minnaard.

[Wicher (wicher)]

Disregard that, adding 'noarp' to /etc/dhcpcd.conf prevents the slowdown too and that's where such behaviour modifications should go.

[Robby Workman (rworkman)]

Well, it *is* possible to call dhcpcd with a specific config file using the "-f" flag, and I seem to recall some discussion of doing that in what will eventually be wicd-2.0.