"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Tired of lugging that laptop from the office to home only to find that once you get there you have to boot your M$ operating system, change your network settings to work with your home network, and then ... ah-hem REBOOT?!  I was!  [Enter DHCP from stage left.]   If your office and home environments are configured correctly, DHCP is about to be your new best friend!

Disclaimer: This article provides information we have gleamed from reading the books, the HOWTOs, man pages, usenet news groups, and countless hours banging on the keyboard. It is not meant to be an all inclusive exhaustive study on the topic, but rather, a stepping stone from the novice to the intermediate user.  All the examples are taken directly from our home networks so we know they work.

How to use this guide:

• Words encapsulated by square brackets like [Enter] indicate the depression of a key on the keyboard or a mouse button [Mouse1]
• Words encapsulated by squiggly brackets like {your name here} indicate data that will/should be substituted with "real" data
• Text depicted in italics are commands you, the user, should type at a prompt

DHCP@Home, why? Convenience.  I was fed up with changing network configurations when I came home and then subsequently went back to the office.  It was completely unacceptable to add a bolt-on utility to manage these settings for me.  Then one day it hit me.  We use DHCP at work.  Why shouldn't I use it at home!  It'll give me an IP address on the local network, the necessary DNS information, and the correct gateway.

DHCP@Work, why?  This one is a little easier to justify than simply being inconvenienced.  I worked at a facility with ~600 workstations.  On the 1st day with the company I had to setup my own machine and get it on the network.  It took nearly 30-minutes for an ill-equiped network administrator, I'll leave his name out of this article since he's still providing network services for a local company, to find an empty IP address that I could statically assign to my system.  He had paper print outs of 3-complete Class-C networks (192.168.[1-3].[1-254]).  It doesn't take higher math to figure out that there's over 750 addresses available.  255 of which were on the network segment I was on.

His process:

1. Find an open slot on the printed copy
2. Verify it was open in his electronic copy
3. Ping the address to verify no one was on it
4. Give it to me, write it on the paper and enter it electronically

IP Numbering Schemes:  If you've decided to run DHCP at home then be smart about it.  Figure out a numbering scheme and stick with it.  You'll know exactly what's on your network just by seeing the IP address.  This advice holds more weight in the corporate world where you're likely to be hosting more machines.  Anyway, this is what I use at home and it closely resembles work as well:

IP Address Range     Hosts

* Important machines and network equipment *

    .001             Your router (if present)
    .002 - .009      Network equipment (switches and hubs)
    .010 - .075      Servers
    .076 - .099      Network Printers

* User workstations *

    .100 - .254      DHCP range
 

Sticking with a scheme like the one above will make visual scans of your logs much easier since you'll likely notice an oddball IP address doing something it's not supposed to or not capable of, i.e., a printer trying to telnet into your machine?  Not likely ... and a good indicator that you didn't read last month's article on security!

Are you ready?  Type the following command at a shell prompt:
 

whereis dhcpd[Enter]

dhcpd: /usr/sbin/dhcpd /etc/dhcpd.conf  /etc/dhcpd.leases /etc/dhcpd.leases~

/etc/dhcpd.conf: This is where we start.  This file is the key to it all and it's extremely simple in design.  Here's what mine looks like:
 

/etc/dhcpd.leases: We now need to give the dhcp server somewhere to start.  We do so by creating an empty leases file.  Type the following command at a shell prompt:

touch /etc/dhcpd.leases[Enter]

Let's go already!  It's what you've been waiting for.  Time to startup the dhcp server and get a client running.  Type the following command at a shell prompt:

/usr/sbin/dhcpd[Enter]

M$ client:  For the purposes of this article I'm going to assume that you've got mostly M$ machines connected to a linux server.

The Microsoft client is actually very easy to configure.  Follow these mouse clicks:
 

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Network

After a quick M$ reboot you should be golden!  For more info on DHCP see the DHCP-minihow-to.  Notice in the opening sentence of this paragraph the word, "should".  Well, here's what I've found.
 

DHCP and Win98 SE (second edition) -- [Bill steps onto his soap box] Nothing like a little competition to spark the boys in Redmond, eh?  The impression was the *everyone* was setting up Linux boxes to share their internet connections at home.  Microsoft responds in short order with Internet Connection Sharing included in Win98 SE.  Quite frankly, I loved it.  I used it to get our church computers running from a single dial connection and it's working great.

However, Win98 SE's ICS seems to be doing something a little off the wall when it comes to DHCP.  My Win98 SE machine at home assigns an IP address to my NIC if it can't find a DHCP server.  In the old days Win9x would use it's last known IP address as long as the lease hadn't expired ... not any more.

If you have problems getting your Win98 SE box to get an IP address then you may want to assign it a permanent address.  What about the numbering scheme you ask?  You `could' set a small range aside at the bottom or top of the range, but still above our default .100 (like .100 - .105).

If you still want the box to have an IP address assigned by DHCP then you can do the following:

• Give the Win98 SE box an IP address on your network.  Don't worry it'll just be temporary.
• Wait a couple of days (haven't narrowed the time down yet)
• Set the machine back to DHCP

Ridiculous?  Yes.  I just haven't looked for a way to permanently fix the problem.  There's probably some undocumented Win9x registry tweak ...  If anyone knows send it to my e-mail address below please!

Copyright © 1999, JC Pollman, Bill Mote
Published in Issue 48 of Linux Gazette, December 1999