If leasehelper fails all that we are left with is a simple error message produced by dnsmasq: lease-init script returned exit code 1 This is because the leasehelper did not write any message to stderr. According to dnsmasq's manpage, whenever it's invoking leasehelper the stderr is kept open: All file descriptors are closed except stdin, which is open to /dev/null, and stdout and stderr which capture output for logging by dnsmasq. As debugging leasehelper is not trivial (because dnsmasq invokes it with plenty of env vars set - that's how data is passed onto helper), let's print an error into stderr if exiting with an error. And since we are not calling public APIs, we have to call virDispatchError() explicitly and since we don't have any connection open, we have to pass NULL. Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@xxxxxxxxxx> --- src/network/leaseshelper.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/network/leaseshelper.c b/src/network/leaseshelper.c index 732dd09610..c20e63efa9 100644 --- a/src/network/leaseshelper.c +++ b/src/network/leaseshelper.c @@ -253,6 +253,8 @@ main(int argc, char **argv) rv = EXIT_SUCCESS; cleanup: + if (rv != EXIT_SUCCESS) + virDispatchError(NULL); if (pid_file_fd != -1) virPidFileReleasePath(pid_file, pid_file_fd); -- 2.26.2