Dan Flett wrote:
Hi there,
Can anyone tell me if DNSMasq can be made to poll /etc/hosts or
equivalent in the same way it polls /etc/resolv.conf? Or is it
necessary to manually send a HUP signal for this to happen?
It's necessary to send SIGHUP.
I am looking at experimenting with the OLSR Nameservice plugin which
automatically distributes hostname-to-ip-address info across a mesh in
hosts file format. Entries are addedd dynamically to the hosts file it
creates (by default /etc/hosts_olsr) whenever a new OLSR node joins the
mesh. It would be quite handy if DNSMasq could automatically re-read
this file whenever it changes.
The problem is avoiding race conditions. What happens if the file is
still changing when dnsmasq starts to read it. Strictly speaking, this
is a problem with automatically reading /etc/resolv.conf too, but the
potential windows are smaller, and precautions are taken to avoid nasty
consequences.
To do this "properly" the best way might be to enhance the DBus code, to
allow name/address pairs to be added and removed.
FYI the readme file for this plugin is here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/olsrd/olsrd-current/lib/nameservice/README?rev=1.8&view=auto
Cheers,
Simon.
