Dear Maintainer,

dhclient failed to renew address or set routes for me. I found the following in syslog:

Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: Can't allocate interface enx0015fflease {#012  interface .
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]:
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: If you think you have received this message due to a bug rather
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: than a configuration issue please read the section on submitting
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: bugs on either our web page at www.isc.org or in the README file
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: before submitting a bug.  These pages explain the proper
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: process and the information we find helpful for debugging.
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]:
Nov 24 19:08:41 orion dhclient[1840]: exiting.

I recognized the "enx0015ff..." string as part of the name that a USB LTE modem I use gets, when it is attached to the system. It was not attached at the time dhclient was failing to work.

So then I looked in /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.leases and found this section:

lease {
  interface "enx0015fflease {
  interface "wls1";
  fixed-address 172.16.0.70;
  option subnet-mask 255.255.254.0;
  option routers 172.16.0.1;
  option dhcp-lease-time 86400;
  option dhcp-option-overload 3;
  option dhcp-message-type 5;
  option domain-name-servers 172.16.0.1;
  option dhcp-server-identifier 172.16.0.1;
  renew 4 2019/11/21 08:00:31;
  rebind 4 2019/11/21 18:23:18;
  expire 4 2019/11/21 21:23:18;
}

which to me appears to have bad syntax in that the curly braces do not match and there are two interface names specified for one lease block.

When I deleted this bad block, dhclient worked fine again.

I had not previously made any manual modifications to the dhclient.leases file.

Kind regards,

Michael Redman

Hi Team,

I forgot to include, this bug seems similar to, but not exactly the same
as, #851950 "unusual signs in dhclient.leases"

Kind regards,

Michael Redman

Hi Team,

Seeing that the "enx..." interface name was truncated and concatenated
with "lease {" in the bad block in dhclient.leases, makes me wonder if
the length of the interface name is relevant to the issue. The full name
of that interface is "enx0015ff038700".

Kind regards,

Michael Redman

Dear submitter,

as the package isc-dhcp has just been removed from the Debian archive
unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports.  We are sorry
that we couldn't deal with your issue properly.

For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1143544

The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal
can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/.

Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and
will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the
earliest.

This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is
a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing
ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)