[Dnsmasq-discuss] [PATCH] Addressing hostsdir shortcomings

[Dominik Derigs]

Dear Simon,

dnsmasq v2.73 added --hostsdir which is an efficient way of re-
loading only parts of the cache. When we tried to use hostsdir
yesterday, we identified three problems. They are described
below. Patches addressing them are attached.

--- ISSUE 1 --- Logging imprecision

Assume you have multiple files in hostsdir, dnsmasq can only log
the directory not the file that was the real source:

dnsmasq: read /home/test/hostsdir/hosts1 - 1 addresses
dnsmasq: read /home/test/hostsdir/hosts2 - 1 addresses
dnsmasq: read /home/test/hostsdir/hosts3 - 1 addresses

dnsmasq: 1 127.0.0.1/34170 query[A] aaa from 127.0.0.1
dnsmasq: 1 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 1 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.1
dnsmasq: 1 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2

This happens because the cache entries all use the same index
that is the directory name.

--- ISSUE 2 --- Outdated entries are not removed

When hostsdir re-reads the file, it does not remove outdated
entries. Assume you modify "192.168.1.1 aaa" to "192.168.1.2
aaa", dnsmasq will now serve two A records for "aaa". This may be
considered okay, however, if I add "192.168.1.1 bbb", PTR
requests for this domain will still be replied with "aaa" which
might be completely outdated information.

--- ISSUE 3 --- Ever growing replies under certain situations

When a users uses an editor that creates (temporary) files during
editing (like "sed -i") or uses a script that writes files line
by line (like "echo '' >> file"), they can quickly end up with
strange things like

dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 query[A] aaa from 127.0.0.1
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.1
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2
dnsmasq: 3 127.0.0.1/34170 /home/test/hostsdir aaa is 192.168.1.2

which is not very meaningful. We check for duplicates before
inserting into the cache, however, duplicate checking can be
foiled here: add_hosts_entry() calls cache_find_by_name() only
once (say it returned "192.168.1.1") so the memcmp() on the
address fails and we can add an arbitrary amount of 192.168.1.2
entries.

-----

For addressing issue 1, I added a new struct *dyndir having a
linked list of struct *hostsfile. With this, cache_insert() can
get the correct index. If a file is newly added, we just add a
new *hostsfile entry to the list (index++).

Issue 2 is an easy one as we can selectively clean the cache when
we know the uid to be removed. This can be called before running
read_hostsfile() to insert new stuff. I added MOVE_FROM and
DELETE to inotify_add_watch() so we catch if a file was removed.
In this case, we only remove old entries.

Issue 3 is fixed by adding a loop over cache_find_by_name() in
add_hosts_entry() to check possible multiple records.

Best,
Dominik
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