[Dnsmasq-discuss] Adding wildcard entries for DHCP lease host names

[Christian Weiske]

Hello,


To make it easy to share links to locally-installed web projects on
developer machines (accessible via "projectname.devmachine"), I want
to have dnsmasq automatically create wildcard entries for the host names
of DHCP leases.

For example, when a dev machine requests an IP via DHCP and sends its
preferred hostname "foo" in the request, dnsmasq should respond to DNS
requests to "projectname.foo" with the IP of the foo machine.

We're using dhcpd as DHCP server, and through the "--dhcp-leasefile"
option, dnsmasq already automatically creates DNS entries for the machines.

I then configured dhcpd to run a script whenever a lease is handed out
or removed. The script generates a dnsmasq configuration file which
contains the wildcard configuration.[1]

After this is done, I have to restart dnsmasq to make it pick up the new
the configuration file.

This is where the problem lies: Restarting dnsmasq takes a second or so,
and in the result DNS resolving for clients takes ~5-6 seconds in the
worst case.

I already read that simply reloading all configuration files while
dnsmasq is running is not possible[2] (as of 2004).

Now my questions:

1. Has this changed in the meantime? Can I make dnsmasq reload the
configuration without restarting?

2. Is there a different approach I could use to achieve my goal of
wildcard DNS entries for DHCP'd machines?


[1] http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/dns-wildcard-dhcp.htm
[2]
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2004q4/000002.html