Hi all. I manage a number of remotely deployed linux servers on provate networks. Command line access to these units is rare, and when I have it, is usually unreliable. Thus I have developed a series of scripts and one liner commands that I use to perform various menial, ordinary tasks. One such task that I need to occasionally perform is changing a static machine to DHCP, or the reverse, switching a DHCP box to static.

For these functions I have always used netconfig with its various flags as this is simplest but there has always been a small problem going from DHCP to static with this package. Switching to DHCP works flawlessly:

$ netconfig --bootproto=dhcp

Works like a charm. The reverse mostly works, but not completely:

$ netconfig --bootproto=none --ip=10.5.7.6 --netmask=255.0.0.0 --gateway=10.0.0.1 --nameserver=10.0.0.1

The problem manifests itself in the form of resolv.conf not being updated with the nameserver provided. Usually, resolv.conf will receive the contents of resolv.conf.predhclient if it exists, regarless of what is provided via the netconfig command and this is the source of the problem. I need resolv.conf to reflect what is requested via netconfig.

Does anyone here have experience with this package? If so, could you provide some suggestions? Thanks.

My first thought is to instead use simple utilities instead of scripting a script. If you were to use ifconfig to make those parameter changes and echo out the nameserver to resolv.conf you wouldn't have to worry about netconfig or some other utility being called from a script you don't have control over. So maybe:
ifconfig --flags ; echo "nameserver 1.2.3.4" > /etc/resolv.conf

Might work.

-Chad

Chad, that's not a bad thought but there are a couple reasons why I rejected this solution a while ago. First, ifconfig doesn't have a flag for changing the nameservers, which is why I turned to netconfig. A utility which can ostensibly handle everything ifconfig can handle as well as the nameservers. and even if I used ifconfig, I would still have to call it from a php file. The other challenge with this solution is that I cannot seem to get 'echo' to work from my php page.

I have the apache user added to the sudoers file, and the line in the sudoers file includes the following line:

apache ALL= NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/reboot, /sbin/reboot, /usr/sbin/netconfig, /bin
/rm, /sbin/service, /bin/echo

the line in my php file (when I attempted to include the echo) is as such:

$cmdToExec = "sudo netconfig --bootproto=none --ip=" . $ipAddress . " --netmask=" . $netmask . " --gateway=" . $gateway . " --nameserver=" . $nameserver;

$output = `$cmdToExec; sudo service network restart; sudo echo "nameserver $nameserver" > /etc/resolv.conf`;

The netconfig command as well as the service restart commands fire off, but the echo will not. Any suggestions on that front? If I could get that working, my problem would be solved.

Another interesting observation:

I chown'd /etc/resolv.conf to apache.apache just to see what would happen. Once I did that, the php script worked. This makes me think that the sudoers file is not properly configured. Do you see anything incorrect about the way I have this set up (above post for details)?

In short, if apache is listed in the sudoes file with /bin/echo listed an available executable, the `sudo echo ...` should be able to write to a file with these permissions:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25 Dec 3 17:27 /etc/resolv.conf

Correct? After all, that's the purpose of sudo.

This is resolved, actually. The solution was to change:

sudo echo 'text' > /etc/resolv.conf

to:

echo 'text' | sudo tee /etc/resolv.conf