Wrongly configured DHCP sever & FC3

Recently I brought up Fedora Core 3 on my PC. My internet access is though a local LAN provided by my cable operator, so my PC is on DHCP and things work well with M$ Windows. Previously Rh9 was unable to setup the routing table properly so I hoped FC3 could do it, but finally problem has repeated in FC3.

The actual problem is that FC3 fails to setup default gateway it received from the DHCP server. I found that the gateway address doesn't belong to sub-network, so if it tries to add a default gateway it doesn't happen because the gateway should be reachable first, and there is no entry in routing table to route packets to the gateway. If gateway also belonged to the sub-network this would not have happened as there will be an entry for the local sub-network in routing table.

Form this I could fairly make out that DHCP sever is not configured properly, but call me a lazy boy I never bothered to confirm this and I raised a bug on dhcp in FC3 bugzilla. The bug owner Jason says DHCP server is not configured correctly, gateway IP should belong to local sub-network and dhcp client is not handling this situation correctly.

It is fair till now but he proposed a fix saying that if we detect this situation, don't bring up the interface and report an error to user. Now this I feel is not fair, agreed that DHCP server admin is a moron and wrongly configured the server, isn't it not fair to handle the situation and bring up the interface when you know what you can do? Only thing you need to do is to add a route to the gateway on that interface, and then add the default route to gateway.

Now look at M$ Windows it doesn't say single word and every thing works properly. Take a situation where there is a common user who doesn’t know much of techie stuff, and he is trying to install FC3. In this kind of a situation (I think badly configured DHCP servers are everywhere) his network doesn't come up and it says fix your ISP server. He will straight away give up using Linux.

These are the small things which the Linux community have to notice and fix. One of the goals is to be a common user friendly OS, otherwise people say Windows works like charm for me where as Linux is cribbs all the time. They really never bother about what the DHCP RFCs say about DHCP servers! I guess I should have a talk with Jason about it.