I wrote another pump patch that allows pump to create /etc/ntp.conf based on ntp servers received from a DHCP server instead of getting my scripts to create it by parsing pump status output. This makes pump a bit faster. Suprisingly it is the fastest by far of the dhcp clients. Without giving any hard numbers (stats are lies and damn lies), here’s my feelings on the fastest DHCP clients in portage:

  1. pump
  2. udhcpc
  3. dhcpcd (although it can easily be the slowest, it’s normally better than dhclient)
  4. dhclient

So if you’re a ricer, or just want a faster DHCP connection then use pump! It does everything 99% of DHCP users need to - the only thing it doesn’t do that the others do is dump it’s DHCP information into env vars so a script can parse them (maybe useful for samba WINS settings), but as I said not many users would need that functionality.

I’m hopefull that I can write another pump patch so I can append a DNS search path option to specify the “search foo bar” option in /etc/resolv.conf. This means that the only thing the pump helper script needs to do is mark the net.eth0 service as inactive/started - which guess what, makes us faster! Debians dhcpcd patchset inspires me todo this - although hopefully more on dhcpcd later …