Hi, all!
So, this will be my first email to this mailing list, in other words, my only
chance to make a first impression. I really hope it isn't a stupid one.
I'm running an Ubuntu 22.04.3 server on which I've been using isc-dhcp-server
to service my local network, mostly because I'm old and it's the one I remember
using back in the day. And it worked well enough, for what I wanted; setting
aside a range of the subnet for dynamic IPs (mostly visitors) while also using
static IPs outside of that range for more permanent devices. So I might not
immediately remember what 192.168.111.47 is, but because it isn't between
192.168.111.100 and 192.168.111.200, I know it's a device that's probably one
I'm supposed to see on my local network, rather than something transient. Of
course, some would say, having local DNS for this might make it easier. So, I
thought ... yeah, it might, and dnsmasq seems perfect for that!
Obviously, I'm here, writing to you, because it isn't working like I wanted it
to, which is a delicate way of saying, things really aren't working very well
at all. I've reverted to isc-dhcp-server for now. I'm posting here for two
reasons. Well, two that I can think of right now, maybe there are more and
we'll think of them as we go along. ;-) But the two I have in mind are: 1)
figure out how to make things work like I want them to, and 2) contribute back
what I see as 'strange', so that those in the know might either say 'oh, that's
expected when you do something as weird as you have been doing' or, more
rewarding, if it were to happen, 'oh, that's not actually supposed to be
possible, how'd you manage to get things quite so borked as that?'
I'd like to start by just asking a simple question I've not managed to find an
answer to anywhere else: are /etc/ethers and /etc/hosts supposed to supersede
dynamic IP allocaiton? Suppose I have all of my "known" devices (MAC addresses)
in /etc/ethers, are those supposed to appear to dnsmasq as implicit
--dhcp-host= declarations, to take precedence over dynamic host IP allocation
as provided by --dhcp-range= statements in the conf file?
And as for the things that don't work at all part: As deployed, probably badly
configured by me, dnsmasq is apparently recognising the /etc/ethers entry and
matching it with /etc/hosts, because that shows up and looks good in
/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leaes, but then, also allocating it a dynamic IP address,
which results in entries like this:
1694633632 41:c4:b7:ff:16:a3 192.168.111.126 192.168.111.20 # media-server *
That not only looks wrong, but is wrong enough that if I stop dnsmasq and then
restart it, it refuses to run until I've deleted that file. Clearly, I've done
something terrible somewhere, but I still find it interesting that dnsmasq
would produce a lease file that is so wrong that it segfaults upon trying to
read it back upon restart.
Also, it's nice to meet you all!
Regards,
Sebastian Trunkles
Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.
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