dhcp lease renewal treated as equivalent to ifup?

[Jason Haar]

I routinely sit on our work guest network which has a 1 hour DHCP lease time.

What I'm noticing is that every hour skype and pidgin are reporting "buddy offline,.....,buddy online". What appears to be happening is the NetworkManager is (successfully) renewing the lease - but appears to trigger whatever APIs it normally triggers when network changes occur. In other words, renewing a DHCP lease seems to be treated the same as resetting a network interface

I don't know if this is a bug or is expected behaviour, but from a user perspective I do not understand why successfully checking if the IP address you have is still valid should trigger anything: nothing has changed, so why "tell" other applications that something has? To put it another way, if I set a static IP, I bet these applications would no longer think network changes are occurring, so why can't the same thing happen with successful DHCP renewals

Thanks for listening

Jason

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: network-manager 0.9.8.8-0ubuntu7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-29.53-generic 3.13.11.2
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-29-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Jun 13 08:47:36 2014
IfupdownConfig:
 # interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
 auto lo
 iface lo inet loopback
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-05-01 (42 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140417)
NetworkManager.state:
 [main]
 NetworkingEnabled=true
 WirelessEnabled=true
 WWANEnabled=true
 WimaxEnabled=true
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: network-manager
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
WifiSyslog:

ftp_proxy: http://localhost:3128/
http_proxy: http://localhost:3128/
modified.conffile..etc.NetworkManager.NetworkManager.conf: [modified]
mtime.conffile..etc.NetworkManager.NetworkManager.conf: 2014-05-02T16:40:21.190732
nmcli-dev:
 DEVICE TYPE STATE DBUS-PATH
 98:D6:F7:D1:30:7B bluetooth disconnected /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/7
 wlan0 802-11-wireless connected /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/1
 eth0 802-3-ethernet unavailable /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/0
nmcli-nm:
 RUNNING VERSION STATE NET-ENABLED WIFI-HARDWARE WIFI WWAN-HARDWARE WWAN
 running 0.9.8.8 connected enabled enabled enabled enabled enabled
no_proxy: trimblecorp.net