Stephen Rose wrote:
I've read the previous exchange about Dnsmasq and reboots with Openwrt. I've also read the bug activity at Openwrt.org. I'm running Openntp so time format is not an issue. Also, I would like to continue using the /tmp partition so the flash is not written. This only causes me one problem. When I reboot the router (running Dnsmasq), the leases file is cleared. When each machine's lease runs out (Windows XP in this case) and it tries to renew its lease, it gets an error because there's no previous lease. But it actually gets the same ip address and a new entry in the lease file when this happens. Is there any way that Dnsmasq could only give an error to the client if the requested address isn't available? It's not a problem for me that the lease file would need time after a reboot to be reconstructed while the leases expired. The real problem is the error drops all my Putty windows. :-)
I'm guessing that what happens is that the client sends a DHCPREQUEST to renew its lease and dnsmasq returns DHCPNAK: lease not found. The client then does DHCPDISCOVER-DHCPOFFER-DHCPREQUEST-DHCPACK and gets a new lease, but for the same address. (Checking the logs on the openWRT box will tell you if this is the case.
My first reaction to this is that returning a DHCPNAK to an attempt to renew an unknown lease is the correct thing to do, and can't be changed, but when I actually looked at the RFC it wasn't clear that that's true. In fact, RFC2131 says almost nothing about sending a DHCPNAK to a client in RENEWING state. (It has plenty to say about SELECTING and INIT_REBOOT, but that's not relevant here.)
As far as I can see, there are no bad consequences to just accepting a renewal of a previously-unknown lease, except in the case that the renewal is broadcast (ie rebinding) and picked up by both the correct server and another which happens to be on the same network. To avoid that, I would probably only change the behaviour when the dhcp-authoritative configuration is set, since that already has the meaning of "optimise for the case that I'm the only DHCP server on this network."
I'll post a query about this to IETF mailing list. Cheers, Simon.
