Re: DHCPv6 support in Network Manager isn't RFC compliant

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 10:23 -0400, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As I'm not subscribed to this mailing-list, I'd appreciate it if you
> could Cc me on your replies. Thanks
> 
> 
> I've recently been spending quite a bit of time testing Network
> Manager's IPv6 support on Ubuntu as part of our ongoing effort of
> getting full IPv6 support for Oneiric.
> 
> It's really looking good and Network Manager does a great job of
> handling all the possible use cases I have, except one small detail.
> 
> I noticed yesterday that Network Manager uses a different DHCP lease
> file for each connection. I can understand why it's been done this way
> for DHCPv4 (makes it more readable and easier to cleanup) but that's
> unfortunately breaking DHCPv6 support.

Thanks for investigating this.

> 
> You're probably aware that with DHCPv6, "host" definitions on the server
> side are no longer tied to a MAC address but instead to a DUID.
> This DUID is defined in RFC 3315, section 9.
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3315.txt
> 
> Quoting part of this specific section:
>    The DUID is carried in an option because it may be variable length
>    and because it is not required in all DHCP messages.  The DUID is
>    designed to be unique across all DHCP clients and servers, and stable
>    for any specific client or server - that is, the DUID used by a
>    client or server SHOULD NOT change over time if at all possible; for
>    example, a device's DUID should not change as a result of a change in
>    the device's network hardware.
> 
> The way the ISC dhclient works, it's looking for a default-duid field in
> its lease file. For example, on my machine I currently have:
>   default-duid "\000\001\000\001\025\303}\370\000#\024\243\331\244";
> 
> This is fine as long as dhclient always uses the same lease file but
> it's sadly not the current behavior when used with Network Manager.
> 
> The current behavior's IPv4 equivalent would be a changing MAC address
> for every single network defined in Network Manager, which is really
> problematic for system administrators who need to do per-host
> configuration with DHCPv6.
> 
> 
> I'd highly recommend Network Manager either uses
> /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient6.leases as its lease file or if you absolutely
> want to keep a separate lease file per connection, then use the
> following algorithm:
> 
>  1) Check if /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient6.leases exists
>   1a) If it does, grab the DUID from it.
>   1b) If it doesn't, generate a new DUID and write it to
> /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient6.leases
>  2) Write that DUID to your per-connection lease file prior to starting
> dhclient

This is probably the best course of action; if there's already a
leasefile but that leasefile doesn't have a default DUID, then we add
the default DUID to the top of the leasefile.  If there isnt' a
leasefile, then we create a new leasefile with one line (for the
default-duid) and pass that file to dhclient like we normally do.

If /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient6.leases doesn't exist (it doesn't on any of my
systems) then we should probably scan existing leasefiles and grab the
first default duid that we find.  That could be a performance issue
though, so if possible the code should only do this *once* (in
nm-dhcp-dhclient.c) and store the value in a global 'static char *'
variable so that it can be re-used from other instances of
NMDHCPDhclient without having to be re-read.

Anyone want to take a stab at the patch?  Should be pretty simple.
Testcases earn you a bonus :)

Dan