RE: location of DHCP lease files

["Miner, Jonathan W \(US SSA\)" <jonathan w miner baesystems com>]

I understand the need for multiple lease files, based on network.

My concern was the two different directories being used.  I was trying to solve a network problem, and couldn't understand why my lease files were several months old... Then I discovered that NM was putting lease files somewhere else.

Persistence across boots would require some cooperation with the DHCP server, which, in my case, may give me a new IP each time I boot. (It's some 3rd party, Windows based DHCP/DNS "solution", which I don't manage)

- Jon


-----Original Message-----
From:	Dan Williams [mailto:dcbw redhat com]
Sent:	Tue 11/4/2008 1:41 PM
To:	Miner, Jonathan W (US SSA)
Cc:	networkmanager-list gnome org
Subject:	Re: location of DHCP lease files

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 11:47 -0500, Miner, Jonathan W (US SSA) wrote:
> Hi -
> 
> I've noticed that the native Fedora "ifup-eth" script puts its lease files into
> 
> /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-${DEVICE}.leases
> 
> but, NetworkManager puts the lease files into
> 
> /var/run/dhclient-${DEVICE}.lease

Correct.  NM uses different lease files because in the near future,
we'll want to use separate lease files for _each connection_.  Since
many machines move around, it's pretty pointless to use the same lease
file for your home AP as for your work AP.

What happens right now is that you'll get a lease from work, dhclient
will cache it, and then when you come home it'll try to renew that work
lease at home, leading to DHCP lag.  That's bad.

So even if the lease files _did_ stay in the same place as dhclient puts
them, you'd have a lot more lease files anyway.  But, once we modify NM
to handle leasefile-per-connection, we should probably move them back
to /var/lib/dhclient just to they are persistent.

I assume you're worried about persistence of the lease across boots?

Dan