A year and some change ago I scrounged together a computer, put mdk on it, and set it up as a masquerade firewall and DHCPd server for my cable modem at home. I have a script that is run at boot (and is set up to be rerun at any time) to set up all of my ipchain rules and load kernel modules (like for ftp and such) and of course DHCPd has its config file. (The ipchains script has global [script] variables to store IP address for interfaces, store interface is which and stuff like that.) A couple of my friends saw what I did and realized that they needed something like that, so I set up computers for them. The problem is that my address never changes, so everything is always happy for me, but their addresses are dynamic and keep on changing. The current mdk 7.1 seems to be able keep rolling along when the IP address and default gateway change, but problems arise when the cable modem providers change the DNS servers and also in the rare instance that a machine gets rebooted. (Linux has been a solid performer, but there are others factors that come into play. One household got switched to a different network and was issued a new cable modem along with that and things chugged along ok until a month or so down the road when the computer was rebooted.) A possible solution that I thought of, but haven't tried yet would be to do the following: Write a script to update the ipchains and dhcpd config file when addresses change then have the script reload dhcpd and rerun the ipchains config file. Set up an hourly cron job to run this update script. 1. First have the script archive any pre-existing Sed scripts to update dhcpd and ipchains. Also have it look for a saved copy of resolv.conf and archive the saved resolve.conf file if present. 2. Have the update script run ifconfig and an Awk script to pull the Internet IP address out of the ifconfig output and generate a Sed script to update the ipchains and dhcpd config files. Also make a new saved copy of resolv.conf 3. Run diff on the new and archived resolv.conf files. If the new one is different, then run an Awk script to append Sed commands to the Sed script to update the dhcpd config file. (Do nothing if there is no archived file.) 4. Then, if there are archived Sed scripts, run diff to check for differences between the new and archived scripts. If there is a difference, run the new Sed script and rerun the ipchains config or reload dhcpd. (Do nothing if there is no archived file. This seems like a cluggy way to do things. Is there a more elegant way to keep ipchains and dhcpd information up to date? I would especially like to do something that would be triggered to update everything necessary the moment that dhcpcd got new IP information from the ISP.
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