[Dnsmasq-discuss] Wildcards in tags

Geoff Back geoff at demonlair.co.uk
Wed Aug 25 12:08:11 UTC 2021


Good morning,

TL;DR: I need to wildcard-match interface tags and can't see how.

I currently have dnsmasq working on a Linux VPN server to provide DHCP
options to VPN clients by using these config elements to bind only the
vpn interfaces:

====8<==============8<================
interface=ppp*
bind-dynamic
dhcp-range=10.99.0.254,static
dhcp-option=option:router
dhcp-option=6,10.99.0.254
dhcp-option=121,<routes>
dhcp-option=249,<routes>
====8<==============8<================

This works just fine.  However, I now need to also run regular DHCP on
other interfaces with different options.  Tags seem like the perfect
solution to this.

As I understand it, the interface on which the request is received
becomes a tag, which would seem fine, but as far as I can tell from the
source of version 2.85, the tag:xxx in dhcp-option etc do not support
wildcards like the 'interface' directive, so I cannot use e.g.

dhcp-option=tag:ppp*,option:router

So I figure OK, set another tag based on the interface tag to represent
a "group of interfaces", and I end up with this:

====8<==============8<================

# basic binding settings for all PPP interfaces plus two ethernets.
bind-dynamic
interface=ppp*
interface=lan2
interface=lan3

# Set a tag for all requests on PPP interfaces.
# If I understand correctly requests on ppp2 (for example) set a tag ppp2,
# This should work according to docs but there could be dozens of ppp
# interfaces in use making this really long and adding a lot of checks
to every request.
tag-if=set:ppp,tag:ppp0
tag-if=set:ppp,tag:ppp1
tag-if=set:ppp,tag:ppp2
... repeated as necessary ...

# DHCP for all ppp interfaces
# match using tag set by tag-if above.
dhcp-range=tag:ppp,10.99.0.254,static
dhcp-option=tag:ppp,option:router
dhcp-option=tag:ppp,6,10.99.0.254
dhcp-option=tag:ppp,121,<routes>
dhcp-option=tag:ppp,249,<routes>

# DHCP for lan2
# match to interface tag
dhcp-range=tag:lan2,10.0.0.1,10.0.0.99
dhcp-option=tag:lan2,option:router,10.0.0.254

====8<==============8<================

Instead of having to give large numbers of "tag-if=set:ppp,tag:ppp9"
lines for all the possible ppp interfaces, I would like to do this:

# set 'ppp' tag for all PPP interfaces
tag-if=set:ppp,tag:ppp*

Of course, allowing wildcards on all tag matches would work too, but my
thinking is that restricting wildcards to 'tag-if' avoids the
performance impact of potentially doing wildcard checks on every
'dhcp-option' etc. during DHCP packet processing and instead it gets
done once through 'tag-if'.

Have I missed something and there is already a way to do this?
Or if not, is it something that could be added?

If it's an acceptable add, I can knock up a patch to do it but I'll have
to learn enough of the dnsmasq code first.

Regards,

Geoff.

-- 

Geoff Back
What if we're all just characters in someone's nightmares?




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