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DHCP Howto

Mandrake 9.1, 2003

Herman Oosthuysen

Aerospace Software Ltd., Licence: GPL

General

There are two DHCP daemons to think about:

dhcpcd
dhcpd

Dhcpcd is used to get an address from a DHCP server. You need this on the ethernet card connected to a DSL modem or a server.

Dhcpd is used by a server to assign addresses to hosts on the network.

DHCPCD

The DSL modem wants to see the MAC address that it was originally configured with. If you change the ethernet card, then you have to overide the MAC address to keep things working. Running dhcpcd is easy - just specify the ethernet card to work with. Once it gotten an address, it saves the data in /etc/dhcpc directory.

Add some entries to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to get dhcpcd to work:

## Configure the ADSL ethernet port with a specific HW
address
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop
ifconfig eth1 hw ether 00:20:78:d9:c3:c8
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start
## Run the dhcpcd daemon
dhcpcd eth1

DHCPD

The Mandrake Server Wizzard for this one doesn't work. The wizzard asks the required questions but doesn't do anything as far as I can tell.

As a minimum, you have to specify the subnet and range. You could also add some optional info for the benefit of the hosts connecting to the server.

Create the file /etc/dhcpd.conf:

ddns-update-style none;
authoritative;
subnet 192.168.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {        
default gateway 192.168.10.100;
option routers 192.168.10.100;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "aerospacesoftware.com";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.10.100;
range dynamic-bootp 192.168.10.200 192.168.10.250;
default-lease-time 86400;
max-lease-time 604800;
}

Test dhcpd in the foreground with:

dhcpd -f
Press Ctrl-C to kill it

then run it as a daemon

dhcpd

Hope this helps!

Herman