I asked Simon Kelley, author of the excellent dnsmasq, this morning whether he could imagine Lua as an alternative to the dhcp-script option, which launches a custom program when a DHCP lease changes. As he wasn’t very familiar with Lua, I thought I’d give it a try for two reasons: 1) I’ve received very positive feedback on my Lua back-end for BIND (can’t tell you about that just yet but I will when it’s ripe), and 2) in an environment with very few resources, I need the functionality of dhcp-script but don’t want the fork/exec overhead.

I know, because Simon told me before I started, that the way I’ve implemented it is … suboptimal as it can block dnsmasq, but maybe Simon will have the time and the inclination to put that right?

Anyways, a patch to Simon is en route.

Update 2011-12-16: Simon has thankfully taken on the job of properly integrating the desired functionality into dnsmasq. :)