Change address on every DHCP renewal

Posted Sep 3, 2025 9:05 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Change address on every DHCP renewal by vonbrand
Parent article: Linux's missing CRL infrastructure

YouTube is not a good test for seamless switching at the network layer, since it makes many small requests, and copes well with connection drop (by design - YouTube is meant to work even on bad networks).

YouTube (and other streaming media platforms) work by stitching together a lot of small (typically 10 seconds or so) clips at the client side, and YouTube is set up so that if you download the first part of a clip, then change network, it's possible to download the rest of that clip with a range request, instead of a full redownload.

It also adapts to network conditions by using lower bitrate clips if requests are either not completing in full, or taking too long (since 10 seconds at 400 kbit/s is less data to transfer than 10 seconds at 2 Mbit/s).

To test properly, you'd need a server side under your control, and you'd be watching for connection drops of something long-lived like an SSH connection. And, of course, the best fix is to not depend on long-lived connections to begin with - you're in the best possible place if connections can drop freely without issue, and you always find systems by mDNS or similar, not IP.