How can I make NetworkManager assign specific addresses and names to machines that connect via "Shared to other computers"?

Question

It appears as if, in Ubuntu 10.10, NetworkManger uses dnsmasq to implement the "Shared to other computers" method. This is work fairly well for me, but I want the machines that connect to get specific IPs and names. I would have thought this would be as simple as creating the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file with a bunch of dhcp-host lines in it, but NetworkManager seems to be using a custom configuration (/tmp/randomfilename.conf) instead of the one in /etc. Is there some way to edit the config file NetworkManger uses, or is there some way in the GUI to do what I want?

Answer 1

There is no way unfortunately. The settings are currently hard-coded in NetworkManager; since they need to match at multiple different levels (the dnsmasq configuration needs to match with the generated iptables rules for connection sharing to work, since it relies on NAT and IP forwarding).

Note that the file generated in /tmp/ has never contained any data, and won't; it's an empty file that used to be passed to avoid using other configuration files for dnsmasq, since they'd interfere with setting up connection sharing.