lease file grows infinitely large very fast

[Peter Miller]

My DHCP server had a problem were it would only serve leases for a couple of minutes before stopping responding altogether. Looking at the server logs, it was soon aparrent that the leases file was growing amazingly fast (the network had a single client at that stage) and it was all the same lease, and it never stopped growing.

I grabbed the dhcp3 source package and rebuilt it. No change in behaviour. But there was a huge number of compiler warnings. One in particular caught my eye: "compaison always false due to limited range of data type". The code looked innocent enough, but it turns out to be a GCC bug mishandling

binding_state_t __attribute__ ((mode (__byte__))) binding_state;

declarations in the struct lease declaration, in the includes/dhcpd.h file. Removing the attributes got rid of the warnings, and fixed the dhcp server, too.
I have a patch which fixes all warnings.

[Peter Miller (pmiller-opensource)]

This patch fixes all compiler warnings.

See the specific portion of the patch dealing with the include/dhcpd.h file for the bug fix.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Patch available for review

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

Another dhclient bug that Martin should really look at, not me

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Peter, thanks for your great analysis and the patch!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Oh, this has already been fixed upstream in 3.0.3, and thus in Dapper. Thanks anyway!