[Cialug] DHCP question - Vendor info.

[Aaron Porter]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Josh
More<morej at alliancetechnologies.net> wrote:
> I'm not an expert, but the few times I've needed to do vendor
> identification on a network, I just use the first three bytes and that
> gets the job done.
>
> I don't think it's any more complex than that.

It's oh SO MUCH MORE complicated than that, naturally. Josh is talking
about an Ethernet OUI (look up service here
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml ). That'll tell you
who manufactured the computer or ethernet card sending the request,
and can be quite useful. The DHCP protocol has all sorts of knobs that
can be set by the requesting client, a quick `man 5 dhcp-options` will
lead you down that rabbit warren, including such strings as:

vendor-class-identifier
vendor-encapsulated-options