[Mageia-dev] dhclient lease files location

Thu Feb 7 09:37:22 CET 2013

I'm taking this out of bugzilla for larger visibility:
+https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8391
+
+Initiallly (mageia2), we had both dhcpd (the server) and dhclient (guess 
+what?) use a shared directory (/var/lib/dhcp), belonging to dhcp-common 
+package, to store their lease file. And I had this bugreport about 
+dhclient trying to store under a non-existent /var/lib/dhclient directory.
+
+I modified the dhcp package as in Fedora, to have each part 
+(client/server) use their own, self-provided, state directory to store 
+their lease file: /var/lib/dhcpd and /var/lib/dhclient. I expected to 
+fix the issue, and making life easier by mimicating fedora setup.
+
+Then Dave reported he now had the same error message as before, but with 
+the old directory: dhclient tries to store lease files under no more 
+existent /var/lib/dhcp directory...
+
+I grepped /etc for occurences of '/var/lib/dhcp', without results. I had 
+a look in networkmanager sources, which seems to be the culprit. It once 
+used C macro NM_DHCLIENT_STATE_DIRECTORY for this purpose, but not 
+anymore. Now, according to current code, it should uses its own state 
+directory (/var/lib/NetworkManager) to store those files, but that's 
+obviously not the case. And I'm myself having lease files in both 
+directories (/var/lib/dhclient and /var/lib/dhcp).
+
+I'm suspecting a mix of hardcoded or default configuration between dhcp 
+(the package), networkmanager and initscripts, but I can't figure where 
+exactly. If someone with more knowledge of those deep arcanes could 
+help, I'd be very grateful.
+-- 
+BOFH excuse #120:
+
+we just switched to FDDI.
+