[Mageia-dev] dhclient lease files location

[Guillaume Rousse]

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.