Using Network Event Broker

network-event-broker is a daemon that configures network and executes scripts on network events such as systemd-networkd’s DBus events, dhclient lease gains, and so on.

network-event-broker also detects the following events:

• An IP address is added/removed/modified
• A link is added or removed

In the /etc/network-event-broker directory, network-event-broker creates the link state directories such as carrier.d, configured.d, degraded.d, no-carrier.d, routable.d and manager state directory such as manager.d . You can also keep the executable scripts in these directories.

Use Case: Running command when a new address is acquired via DHCP.

1. systemd-networkd: systemd-networkd’s scripts are executed when the daemon receives the relevant event from systemd-networkd.

    May 14 17:08:13 Zeus cat[273185]: OperationalState="routable"  
    May 14 17:08:13 Zeus cat[273185]: LINK=ens33
   

2. dhclient: For dhclient, scripts are executed in the routable.d directory when dhclient modifies the /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient.leases file and lease information is passed to the scripts as environmental arguments.

Environment variables such as LINK, LINKINDEX= and DHCP lease information DHCP_LEASE= are passed to the scripts.

Configuration

To manage the network-event-broker configuration, use the configuration file named network-broker.toml located in the following directory: /etc/network-broker/

[System] section

You can set values for the following keys in the [System] section:

LogLevel=
Specifies the log level. The key takes one of the following values: info, warn, error, debug and fatal. Default is info.

Generator=
Specifies the network event generator source. The key takes one of the following values: systemd-networkd or dhclient. Default is systemd-networkd.

[Network] section

You can set values for the following keys in the [Network] section:

Links=
A whitespace-separated list of links whose events should be monitored. No default value is set for this key.

RoutingPolicyRules=
A whitespace-separated list of links for which you want to configure the routing policy rules per address. When you set this configuration, network-event-broker automatically adds the to and from routing policy rules in another routing table (ROUTE_TABLE_BASE = 9999 + ifindex). When these addresses are removed, the routing policy rules are dropped. No default value is set for this key.

UseDNS=
Specifies whether you want to send the DNS server details to systemd-resolved. The key takes one of the following values: true, false. When set to true, the DNS server details are sent to systemd-resolved via DBus. This is applicable only to the DHClient. Default is false.

UseDomain=
Specifies whether you want to send the DNS domain details to systemd-resolved. The key takes one of the following values: true, false. When set to true, the DNS domain details are sent to systemd-resolved via DBus. This is applicable only to the DHClient. Default is false.

UseHostname=
Specifies whether you want to send the host name to systemd-hostnamed. The key takes one of the following values: true, false. When set to true, the host name is sent to systemd-hostnamed via DBus. This is applicable only to the DHClient. Default is false.

The following example shows a sample configuration of the key values in the network-broker.toml file:

❯ sudo cat /etc/network-broker/network-broker.toml 
[System]
LogLevel="debug"
Generator="dhclient"

[Network]
Links="ens33 ens37"
RoutingPolicyRules="ens33 ens37"
UseDNS="true"
UseDomain="true"