I'm taking this out of bugzilla for larger visibility: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8391
Initiallly (mageia2), we had both dhcpd (the server) and dhclient (guess what?) use a shared directory (/var/lib/dhcp), belonging to dhcp-common package, to store their lease file. And I had this bugreport about dhclient trying to store under a non-existent /var/lib/dhclient directory.
I modified the dhcp package as in Fedora, to have each part (client/server) use their own, self-provided, state directory to store their lease file: /var/lib/dhcpd and /var/lib/dhclient. I expected to fix the issue, and making life easier by mimicating fedora setup.
Then Dave reported he now had the same error message as before, but with the old directory: dhclient tries to store lease files under no more existent /var/lib/dhcp directory...
I grepped /etc for occurences of '/var/lib/dhcp', without results. I had a look in networkmanager sources, which seems to be the culprit. It once used C macro NM_DHCLIENT_STATE_DIRECTORY for this purpose, but not anymore. Now, according to current code, it should uses its own state directory (/var/lib/NetworkManager) to store those files, but that's obviously not the case. And I'm myself having lease files in both directories (/var/lib/dhclient and /var/lib/dhcp).
I'm suspecting a mix of hardcoded or default configuration between dhcp (the package), networkmanager and initscripts, but I can't figure where exactly. If someone with more knowledge of those deep arcanes could help, I'd be very grateful.
-- BOFH excuse #120: we just switched to FDDI.
