[Dnsmasq-discuss] DBus support

[Simon Kelley]

Howard Chu wrote:
> I've just written a patch for NetworkManager to update dnsmasq's server list 
> using DBus. You can find it here
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2008-September/msg00042.html
> 
Cool!

> However, it seems there's a missing detail here - it's possible to run 
> multiple instances of dnsmasq on the same machine (using separate 
> listen-addresses, etc.) but apparently only one of them can register as a DBus 
> listener. Is that correct? I guess it's not likely that multiple instances 
> would be running on a machine with NetworkManager, so perhaps this is all 
> irrelevant. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.
> 
> E.g., if in fact you can have multiple dnsmasq instances listening on DBus, 
> how should NetworkManager decide which one to send nameserver updates to?

The DBus service and path are hard-coded (they're specified in 
src/config.c) I guess that means that only one instance can be running, 
with dbus enabled and the "which one gets updated" question is moot.

The usual reason to run multiple instances of dnsmasq is to provide 
services to virtual machines, libvirt does this. These instances will 
probably not have --enable-dbus set in their configuration, so no problem.

That's my hazy understanding. If it's wrong and you need more run-time 
configurability of the DBus code in dnsmasq, just shout (or submit a patch).

Cheers,

Simon.