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30 .\" $Id: dhcpd.conf.5,v 1.114 2012/04/02 22:47:35 sar Exp $
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32 .TH dhcpd.conf 5
33 .SH NAME
34 dhcpd.conf - dhcpd configuration file
35 .SH DESCRIPTION
36 The dhcpd.conf file contains configuration information for
37 .IR dhcpd,
38 the Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server.
39 .PP
40 The dhcpd.conf file is a free-form ASCII text file. It is parsed by
41 the recursive-descent parser built into dhcpd. The file may contain
42 extra tabs and newlines for formatting purposes. Keywords in the file
43 are case-insensitive. Comments may be placed anywhere within the
44 file (except within quotes). Comments begin with the # character and
45 end at the end of the line.
46 .PP
47 The file essentially consists of a list of statements. Statements
48 fall into two broad categories - parameters and declarations.
49 .PP
50 Parameter statements either say how to do something (e.g., how long a
51 lease to offer), whether to do something (e.g., should dhcpd provide
52 addresses to unknown clients), or what parameters to provide to the
53 client (e.g., use gateway 220.177.244.7).
54 .PP
55 Declarations are used to describe the topology of the
56 network, to describe clients on the network, to provide addresses that
57 can be assigned to clients, or to apply a group of parameters to a
58 group of declarations. In any group of parameters and declarations,
59 all parameters must be specified before any declarations which depend
60 on those parameters may be specified.
61 .PP
62 Declarations about network topology include the \fIshared-network\fR
63 and the \fIsubnet\fR declarations. If clients on a subnet are to be
64 assigned addresses
65 dynamically, a \fIrange\fR declaration must appear within the
66 \fIsubnet\fR declaration. For clients with statically assigned
67 addresses, or for installations where only known clients will be
68 served, each such client must have a \fIhost\fR declaration. If
69 parameters are to be applied to a group of declarations which are not
70 related strictly on a per-subnet basis, the \fIgroup\fR declaration
71 can be used.
72 .PP
73 For every subnet which will be served, and for every subnet
74 to which the dhcp server is connected, there must be one \fIsubnet\fR
75 declaration, which tells dhcpd how to recognize that an address is on
76 that subnet. A \fIsubnet\fR declaration is required for each subnet
77 even if no addresses will be dynamically allocated on that subnet.
78 .PP
79 Some installations have physical networks on which more than one IP
80 subnet operates. For example, if there is a site-wide requirement
81 that 8-bit subnet masks be used, but a department with a single
82 physical ethernet network expands to the point where it has more than
83 254 nodes, it may be necessary to run two 8-bit subnets on the same
84 ethernet until such time as a new physical network can be added. In
85 this case, the \fIsubnet\fR declarations for these two networks must be
86 enclosed in a \fIshared-network\fR declaration.
87 .PP
88 Note that even when the \fIshared-network\fR declaration is absent, an
89 empty one is created by the server to contain the \fIsubnet\fR (and any scoped
90 parameters included in the \fIsubnet\fR). For practical purposes, this means
91 that "stateless" DHCP clients, which are not tied to addresses (and therefore
92 subnets) will receive the same configuration as stateful ones.
93 .PP
94 Some sites may have departments which have clients on more than one
95 subnet, but it may be desirable to offer those clients a uniform set
96 of parameters which are different than what would be offered to
97 clients from other departments on the same subnet. For clients which
98 will be declared explicitly with \fIhost\fR declarations, these
99 declarations can be enclosed in a \fIgroup\fR declaration along with
100 the parameters which are common to that department. For clients
101 whose addresses will be dynamically assigned, class declarations and
102 conditional declarations may be used to group parameter assignments
103 based on information the client sends.
104 .PP
105 When a client is to be booted, its boot parameters are determined by
106 consulting that client's \fIhost\fR declaration (if any), and then
107 consulting any \fIclass\fR declarations matching the client,
108 followed by the \fIpool\fR, \fIsubnet\fR and \fIshared-network\fR
109 declarations for the IP address assigned to the client. Each of
110 these declarations itself appears within a lexical scope, and all
111 declarations at less specific lexical scopes are also consulted for
112 client option declarations. Scopes are never considered
113 twice, and if parameters are declared in more than one scope, the
114 parameter declared in the most specific scope is the one that is
115 used.
116 .PP
117 When dhcpd tries to find a \fIhost\fR declaration for a client, it
118 first looks for a \fIhost\fR declaration which has a
119 \fIfixed-address\fR declaration that lists an IP address that is valid
120 for the subnet or shared network on which the client is booting. If
121 it doesn't find any such entry, it tries to find an entry which has
122 no \fIfixed-address\fR declaration.
123 .SH EXAMPLES
124 .PP
125 A typical dhcpd.conf file will look something like this:
126 .nf
127
128 .I global parameters...
129
130 subnet 204.254.239.0 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
131 \fIsubnet-specific parameters...\fR
132 range 204.254.239.10 204.254.239.30;
133 }
134
135 subnet 204.254.239.32 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
136 \fIsubnet-specific parameters...\fR
137 range 204.254.239.42 204.254.239.62;
138 }
139
140 subnet 204.254.239.64 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
141 \fIsubnet-specific parameters...\fR
142 range 204.254.239.74 204.254.239.94;
143 }
144
145 group {
146 \fIgroup-specific parameters...\fR
147 host zappo.test.isc.org {
148 \fIhost-specific parameters...\fR
149 }
150 host beppo.test.isc.org {
151 \fIhost-specific parameters...\fR
152 }
153 host harpo.test.isc.org {
154 \fIhost-specific parameters...\fR
155 }
156 }
157
158 .ce 1
159 Figure 1
160
161 .fi
162 .PP
163 Notice that at the beginning of the file, there's a place
164 for global parameters. These might be things like the organization's
165 domain name, the addresses of the name servers (if they are common to
166 the entire organization), and so on. So, for example:
167 .nf
168
169 option domain-name "isc.org";
170 option domain-name-servers ns1.isc.org, ns2.isc.org;
171
172 .ce 1
173 Figure 2
174 .fi
175 .PP
176 As you can see in Figure 2, you can specify host addresses in
177 parameters using their domain names rather than their numeric IP
178 addresses. If a given hostname resolves to more than one IP address
179 (for example, if that host has two ethernet interfaces), then where
180 possible, both addresses are supplied to the client.
181 .PP
182 The most obvious reason for having subnet-specific parameters as
183 shown in Figure 1 is that each subnet, of necessity, has its own
184 router. So for the first subnet, for example, there should be
185 something like:
186 .nf
187
188 option routers 204.254.239.1;
189 .fi
190 .PP
191 Note that the address here is specified numerically. This is not
192 required - if you have a different domain name for each interface on
193 your router, it's perfectly legitimate to use the domain name for that
194 interface instead of the numeric address. However, in many cases
195 there may be only one domain name for all of a router's IP addresses, and
196 it would not be appropriate to use that name here.
197 .PP
198 In Figure 1 there is also a \fIgroup\fR statement, which provides
199 common parameters for a set of three hosts - zappo, beppo and harpo.
200 As you can see, these hosts are all in the test.isc.org domain, so it
201 might make sense for a group-specific parameter to override the domain
202 name supplied to these hosts:
203 .nf
204
205 option domain-name "test.isc.org";
206 .fi
207 .PP
208 Also, given the domain they're in, these are probably test machines.
209 If we wanted to test the DHCP leasing mechanism, we might set the
210 lease timeout somewhat shorter than the default:
211
212 .nf
213 max-lease-time 120;
214 default-lease-time 120;
215 .fi
216 .PP
217 You may have noticed that while some parameters start with the
218 \fIoption\fR keyword, some do not. Parameters starting with the
219 \fIoption\fR keyword correspond to actual DHCP options, while
220 parameters that do not start with the option keyword either control
221 the behavior of the DHCP server (e.g., how long a lease dhcpd will
222 give out), or specify client parameters that are not optional in the
223 DHCP protocol (for example, server-name and filename).
224 .PP
225 In Figure 1, each host had \fIhost-specific parameters\fR. These
226 could include such things as the \fIhostname\fR option, the name of a
227 file to upload (the \fIfilename\fR parameter) and the address of the
228 server from which to upload the file (the \fInext-server\fR
229 parameter). In general, any parameter can appear anywhere that
230 parameters are allowed, and will be applied according to the scope in
231 which the parameter appears.
232 .PP
233 Imagine that you have a site with a lot of NCD X-Terminals. These
234 terminals come in a variety of models, and you want to specify the
235 boot files for each model. One way to do this would be to have host
236 declarations for each server and group them by model:
237 .nf
238
239 group {
240 filename "Xncd19r";
241 next-server ncd-booter;
242
243 host ncd1 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:49:2b:57; }
244 host ncd4 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:80:fc:32; }
245 host ncd8 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:22:46:81; }
246 }
247
248 group {
249 filename "Xncd19c";
250 next-server ncd-booter;
251
252 host ncd2 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:88:2d:81; }
253 host ncd3 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:00:14:11; }
254 }
255
256 group {
257 filename "XncdHMX";
258 next-server ncd-booter;
259
260 host ncd1 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:11:90:23; }
261 host ncd4 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:91:a7:8; }
262 host ncd8 { hardware ethernet 0:c0:c3:cc:a:8f; }
263 }
264 .fi
265 .SH ADDRESS POOLS
266 .PP
267 The
268 \fBpool\fR and \fBpool6\fR
269 declarations can be used to specify a pool of addresses that will be
270 treated differently than another pool of addresses, even on the same
271 network segment or subnet. For example, you may want to provide a
272 large set of addresses that can be assigned to DHCP clients that are
273 registered to your DHCP server, while providing a smaller set of
274 addresses, possibly with short lease times, that are available for
275 unknown clients. If you have a firewall, you may be able to arrange
276 for addresses from one pool to be allowed access to the Internet,
277 while addresses in another pool are not, thus encouraging users to
278 register their DHCP clients. To do this, you would set up a pair of
279 pool declarations:
280 .PP
281 .nf
282 subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
283 option routers 10.0.0.254;
284
285 # Unknown clients get this pool.
286 pool {
287 option domain-name-servers bogus.example.com;
288 max-lease-time 300;
289 range 10.0.0.200 10.0.0.253;
290 allow unknown-clients;
291 }
292
293 # Known clients get this pool.
294 pool {
295 option domain-name-servers ns1.example.com, ns2.example.com;
296 max-lease-time 28800;
297 range 10.0.0.5 10.0.0.199;
298 deny unknown-clients;
299 }
300 }
301 .fi
302 .PP
303 It is also possible to set up entirely different subnets for known and
304 unknown clients - address pools exist at the level of shared networks,
305 so address ranges within pool declarations can be on different
306 subnets.
307 .PP
308 As you can see in the preceding example, pools can have permit lists
309 that control which clients are allowed access to the pool and which
310 aren't. Each entry in a pool's permit list is introduced with the
311 .I allow
312 or \fIdeny\fR keyword. If a pool has a permit list, then only those
313 clients that match specific entries on the permit list will be
314 eligible to be assigned addresses from the pool. If a pool has a
315 deny list, then only those clients that do not match any entries on
316 the deny list will be eligible. If both permit and deny lists exist
317 for a pool, then only clients that match the permit list and do not
318 match the deny list will be allowed access.
319 .PP
320 The \fBpool6\fR declaration is similar to the \fBpool6\fR declaration.
321 Currently it is only allowed within a \fBsubnet6\fR declaration, and
322 may not be included directly in a shared network declaration.
323 In addition to the \fBrange6\fR statement it allows the \fBprefix6\fR
324 statement to be included. You may include \fBrange6\fR statements
325 for both NA and TA and \fBprefixy6\fR statements in a single
326 \fBpool6\fR statement.
327 .SH DYNAMIC ADDRESS ALLOCATION
328 Address allocation is actually only done when a client is in the INIT
329 state and has sent a DHCPDISCOVER message. If the client thinks it
330 has a valid lease and sends a DHCPREQUEST to initiate or renew that
331 lease, the server has only three choices - it can ignore the
332 DHCPREQUEST, send a DHCPNAK to tell the client it should stop using
333 the address, or send a DHCPACK, telling the client to go ahead and use
334 the address for a while.
335 .PP
336 If the server finds the address the client is requesting, and that
337 address is available to the client, the server will send a DHCPACK.
338 If the address is no longer available, or the client isn't permitted
339 to have it, the server will send a DHCPNAK. If the server knows
340 nothing about the address, it will remain silent, unless the address
341 is incorrect for the network segment to which the client has been
342 attached and the server is authoritative for that network segment, in
343 which case the server will send a DHCPNAK even though it doesn't know
344 about the address.
345 .PP
346 There may be a host declaration matching the client's identification.
347 If that host declaration contains a fixed-address declaration that
348 lists an IP address that is valid for the network segment to which the
349 client is connected. In this case, the DHCP server will never do
350 dynamic address allocation. In this case, the client is \fIrequired\fR
351 to take the address specified in the host declaration. If the
352 client sends a DHCPREQUEST for some other address, the server will respond
353 with a DHCPNAK.
354 .PP
355 When the DHCP server allocates a new address for a client (remember,
356 this only happens if the client has sent a DHCPDISCOVER), it first
357 looks to see if the client already has a valid lease on an IP address,
358 or if there is an old IP address the client had before that hasn't yet
359 been reassigned. In that case, the server will take that address and
360 check it to see if the client is still permitted to use it. If the
361 client is no longer permitted to use it, the lease is freed if the
362 server thought it was still in use - the fact that the client has sent
363 a DHCPDISCOVER proves to the server that the client is no longer using
364 the lease.
365 .PP
366 If no existing lease is found, or if the client is forbidden to
367 receive the existing lease, then the server will look in the list of
368 address pools for the network segment to which the client is attached
369 for a lease that is not in use and that the client is permitted to
370 have. It looks through each pool declaration in sequence (all
371 .I range
372 declarations that appear outside of pool declarations are grouped into
373 a single pool with no permit list). If the permit list for the pool
374 allows the client to be allocated an address from that pool, the pool
375 is examined to see if there is an address available. If so, then the
376 client is tentatively assigned that address. Otherwise, the next
377 pool is tested. If no addresses are found that can be assigned to
378 the client, no response is sent to the client.
379 .PP
380 If an address is found that the client is permitted to have, and that
381 has never been assigned to any client before, the address is
382 immediately allocated to the client. If the address is available for
383 allocation but has been previously assigned to a different client, the
384 server will keep looking in hopes of finding an address that has never
385 before been assigned to a client.
386 .PP
387 The DHCP server generates the list of available IP addresses from a
388 hash table. This means that the addresses are not sorted in any
389 particular order, and so it is not possible to predict the order in
390 which the DHCP server will allocate IP addresses. Users of previous
391 versions of the ISC DHCP server may have become accustomed to the DHCP
392 server allocating IP addresses in ascending order, but this is no
393 longer possible, and there is no way to configure this behavior with
394 version 3 of the ISC DHCP server.
395 .SH IP ADDRESS CONFLICT PREVENTION
396 The DHCP server checks IP addresses to see if they are in use before
397 allocating them to clients. It does this by sending an ICMP Echo
398 request message to the IP address being allocated. If no ICMP Echo
399 reply is received within a second, the address is assumed to be free.
400 This is only done for leases that have been specified in range
401 statements, and only when the lease is thought by the DHCP server to
402 be free - i.e., the DHCP server or its failover peer has not listed
403 the lease as in use.
404 .PP
405 If a response is received to an ICMP Echo request, the DHCP server
406 assumes that there is a configuration error - the IP address is in use
407 by some host on the network that is not a DHCP client. It marks the
408 address as abandoned, and will not assign it to clients.
409 .PP
410 If a DHCP client tries to get an IP address, but none are available,
411 but there are abandoned IP addresses, then the DHCP server will
412 attempt to reclaim an abandoned IP address. It marks one IP address
413 as free, and then does the same ICMP Echo request check described
414 previously. If there is no answer to the ICMP Echo request, the
415 address is assigned to the client.
416 .PP
417 The DHCP server does not cycle through abandoned IP addresses if the
418 first IP address it tries to reclaim is free. Rather, when the next
419 DHCPDISCOVER comes in from the client, it will attempt a new
420 allocation using the same method described here, and will typically
421 try a new IP address.
422 .SH DHCP FAILOVER
423 This version of the ISC DHCP server supports the DHCP failover
424 protocol as documented in draft-ietf-dhc-failover-12.txt. This is
425 not a final protocol document, and we have not done interoperability
426 testing with other vendors' implementations of this protocol, so you
427 must not assume that this implementation conforms to the standard.
428 If you wish to use the failover protocol, make sure that both failover
429 peers are running the same version of the ISC DHCP server.
430 .PP
431 The failover protocol allows two DHCP servers (and no more than two)
432 to share a common address pool. Each server will have about half of
433 the available IP addresses in the pool at any given time for
434 allocation. If one server fails, the other server will continue to
435 renew leases out of the pool, and will allocate new addresses out of
436 the roughly half of available addresses that it had when
437 communications with the other server were lost.
438 .PP
439 It is possible during a prolonged failure to tell the remaining server
440 that the other server is down, in which case the remaining server will
441 (over time) reclaim all the addresses the other server had available
442 for allocation, and begin to reuse them. This is called putting the
443 server into the PARTNER-DOWN state.
444 .PP
445 You can put the server into the PARTNER-DOWN state either by using the
446 .B omshell (1)
447 command or by stopping the server, editing the last failover state
448 declaration in the lease file, and restarting the server. If you use
449 this last method, change the "my state" line to:
450 .PP
451 .nf
452 .B failover peer "\fIname\fB" state {
453 .B my state partner-down;.
454 .B peer state \fIstate\fB at \fIdate\fB;
455 .B }
456 .fi
457 .PP
458 It is only required to change "my state" as shown above.
459 .PP
460 When the other server comes back online, it should automatically
461 detect that it has been offline and request a complete update from the
462 server that was running in the PARTNER-DOWN state, and then both
463 servers will resume processing together.
464 .PP
465 It is possible to get into a dangerous situation: if you put one
466 server into the PARTNER-DOWN state, and then *that* server goes down,
467 and the other server comes back up, the other server will not know
468 that the first server was in the PARTNER-DOWN state, and may issue
469 addresses previously issued by the other server to different clients,
470 resulting in IP address conflicts. Before putting a server into
471 PARTNER-DOWN state, therefore, make
472 .I sure
473 that the other server will not restart automatically.
474 .PP
475 The failover protocol defines a primary server role and a secondary
476 server role. There are some differences in how primaries and
477 secondaries act, but most of the differences simply have to do with
478 providing a way for each peer to behave in the opposite way from the
479 other. So one server must be configured as primary, and the other
480 must be configured as secondary, and it doesn't matter too much which
481 one is which.
482 .SH FAILOVER STARTUP
483 When a server starts that has not previously communicated with its
484 failover peer, it must establish communications with its failover peer
485 and synchronize with it before it can serve clients. This can happen
486 either because you have just configured your DHCP servers to perform
487 failover for the first time, or because one of your failover servers
488 has failed catastrophically and lost its database.
489 .PP
490 The initial recovery process is designed to ensure that when one
491 failover peer loses its database and then resynchronizes, any leases
492 that the failed server gave out before it failed will be honored.
493 When the failed server starts up, it notices that it has no saved
494 failover state, and attempts to contact its peer.
495 .PP
496 When it has established contact, it asks the peer for a complete copy
497 its peer's lease database. The peer then sends its complete database,
498 and sends a message indicating that it is done. The failed server
499 then waits until MCLT has passed, and once MCLT has passed both
500 servers make the transition back into normal operation. This waiting
501 period ensures that any leases the failed server may have given out
502 while out of contact with its partner will have expired.
503 .PP
504 While the failed server is recovering, its partner remains in the
505 partner-down state, which means that it is serving all clients. The
506 failed server provides no service at all to DHCP clients until it has
507 made the transition into normal operation.
508 .PP
509 In the case where both servers detect that they have never before
510 communicated with their partner, they both come up in this recovery
511 state and follow the procedure we have just described. In this case,
512 no service will be provided to DHCP clients until MCLT has expired.
513 .SH CONFIGURING FAILOVER
514 In order to configure failover, you need to write a peer declaration
515 that configures the failover protocol, and you need to write peer
516 references in each pool declaration for which you want to do
517 failover. You do not have to do failover for all pools on a given
518 network segment. You must not tell one server it's doing failover
519 on a particular address pool and tell the other it is not. You must
520 not have any common address pools on which you are not doing
521 failover. A pool declaration that utilizes failover would look like this:
522 .PP
523 .nf
524 pool {
525 failover peer "foo";
526 \fIpool specific parameters\fR
527 };
528 .fi
529 .PP
530 The server currently does very little sanity checking, so if you
531 configure it wrong, it will just fail in odd ways. I would recommend
532 therefore that you either do failover or don't do failover, but don't
533 do any mixed pools. Also, use the same master configuration file for
534 both servers, and have a separate file that contains the peer
535 declaration and includes the master file. This will help you to avoid
536 configuration mismatches. As our implementation evolves, this will
537 become less of a problem. A basic sample dhcpd.conf file for a
538 primary server might look like this:
539 .PP
540 .nf
541 failover peer "foo" {
542 primary;
543 address anthrax.rc.vix.com;
544 port 519;
545 peer address trantor.rc.vix.com;
546 peer port 520;
547 max-response-delay 60;
548 max-unacked-updates 10;
549 mclt 3600;
550 split 128;
551 load balance max seconds 3;
552 }
553
554 include "/etc/dhcpd.master";
555 .fi
556 .PP
557 The statements in the peer declaration are as follows:
558 .PP
559 The
560 .I primary
561 and
562 .I secondary
563 statements
564 .RS 0.25i
565 .PP
566 [ \fBprimary\fR | \fBsecondary\fR ]\fB;\fR
567 .PP
568 This determines whether the server is primary or secondary, as
569 described earlier under DHCP FAILOVER.
570 .RE
571 .PP
572 The
573 .I address
574 statement
575 .RS 0.25i
576 .PP
577 .B address \fIaddress\fR\fB;\fR
578 .PP
579 The \fBaddress\fR statement declares the IP address or DNS name on which the
580 server should listen for connections from its failover peer, and also the
581 value to use for the DHCP Failover Protocol server identifier. Because this
582 value is used as an identifier, it may not be omitted.
583 .RE
584 .PP
585 The
586 .I peer address
587 statement
588 .RS 0.25i
589 .PP
590 .B peer address \fIaddress\fR\fB;\fR
591 .PP
592 The \fBpeer address\fR statement declares the IP address or DNS name to
593 which the server should connect to reach its failover peer for failover
594 messages.
595 .RE
596 .PP
597 The
598 .I port
599 statement
600 .RS 0.25i
601 .PP
602 .B port \fIport-number\fR\fB;\fR
603 .PP
604 The \fBport\fR statement declares the TCP port on which the server
605 should listen for connections from its failover peer. This statement
606 may be omitted, in which case the IANA assigned port number 647 will be
607 used by default.
608 .RE
609 .PP
610 The
611 .I peer port
612 statement
613 .RS 0.25i
614 .PP
615 .B peer port \fIport-number\fR\fB;\fR
616 .PP
617 The \fBpeer port\fR statement declares the TCP port to which the
618 server should connect to reach its failover peer for failover
619 messages. This statement may be omitted, in which case the IANA
620 assigned port number 647 will be used by default.
621 .RE
622 .PP
623 The
624 .I max-response-delay
625 statement
626 .RS 0.25i
627 .PP
628 .B max-response-delay \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
629 .PP
630 The \fBmax-response-delay\fR statement tells the DHCP server how
631 many seconds may pass without receiving a message from its failover
632 peer before it assumes that connection has failed. This number
633 should be small enough that a transient network failure that breaks
634 the connection will not result in the servers being out of
635 communication for a long time, but large enough that the server isn't
636 constantly making and breaking connections. This parameter must be
637 specified.
638 .RE
639 .PP
640 The
641 .I max-unacked-updates
642 statement
643 .RS 0.25i
644 .PP
645 .B max-unacked-updates \fIcount\fR\fB;\fR
646 .PP
647 The \fBmax-unacked-updates\fR statement tells the remote DHCP server how
648 many BNDUPD messages it can send before it receives a BNDACK
649 from the local system. We don't have enough operational experience
650 to say what a good value for this is, but 10 seems to work. This
651 parameter must be specified.
652 .RE
653 .PP
654 The
655 .I mclt
656 statement
657 .RS 0.25i
658 .PP
659 .B mclt \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
660 .PP
661 The \fBmclt\fR statement defines the Maximum Client Lead Time. It
662 must be specified on the primary, and may not be specified on the
663 secondary. This is the length of time for which a lease may be
664 renewed by either failover peer without contacting the other. The
665 longer you set this, the longer it will take for the running server to
666 recover IP addresses after moving into PARTNER-DOWN state. The
667 shorter you set it, the more load your servers will experience when
668 they are not communicating. A value of something like 3600 is
669 probably reasonable, but again bear in mind that we have no real
670 operational experience with this.
671 .RE
672 .PP
673 The
674 .I split
675 statement
676 .RS 0.25i
677 .PP
678 .B split \fIindex\fR\fB;\fR
679 .PP
680 The split statement specifies the split between the primary and
681 secondary for the purposes of load balancing. Whenever a client
682 makes a DHCP request, the DHCP server runs a hash on the client
683 identification, resulting in value from 0 to 255. This is used as
684 an index into a 256 bit field. If the bit at that index is set,
685 the primary is responsible. If the bit at that index is not set,
686 the secondary is responsible. The \fBsplit\fR value determines
687 how many of the leading bits are set to one. So, in practice, higher
688 split values will cause the primary to serve more clients than the
689 secondary. Lower split values, the converse. Legal values are between
690 0 and 255, of which the most reasonable is 128.
691 .RE
692 .PP
693 The
694 .I hba
695 statement
696 .RS 0.25i
697 .PP
698 .B hba \fIcolon-separated-hex-list\fB;\fR
699 .PP
700 The hba statement specifies the split between the primary and
701 secondary as a bitmap rather than a cutoff, which theoretically allows
702 for finer-grained control. In practice, there is probably no need
703 for such fine-grained control, however. An example hba statement:
704 .PP
705 .nf
706 hba ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:
707 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00;
708 .fi
709 .PP
710 This is equivalent to a \fBsplit 128;\fR statement, and identical. The
711 following two examples are also equivalent to a \fBsplit\fR of 128, but
712 are not identical:
713 .PP
714 .nf
715 hba aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:
716 aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa;
717
718 hba 55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:
719 55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55:55;
720 .fi
721 .PP
722 They are equivalent, because half the bits are set to 0, half are set to
723 1 (0xa and 0x5 are 1010 and 0101 binary respectively) and consequently this
724 would roughly divide the clients equally between the servers. They are not
725 identical, because the actual peers this would load balance to each server
726 are different for each example.
727 .PP
728 You must only have \fBsplit\fR or \fBhba\fR defined, never both. For most
729 cases, the fine-grained control that \fBhba\fR offers isn't necessary, and
730 \fBsplit\fR should be used.
731 .RE
732 .PP
733 The
734 .I load balance max seconds
735 statement
736 .RS 0.25i
737 .PP
738 .B load balance max seconds \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
739 .PP
740 This statement allows you to configure a cutoff after which load
741 balancing is disabled. The cutoff is based on the number of seconds
742 since the client sent its first DHCPDISCOVER or DHCPREQUEST message,
743 and only works with clients that correctly implement the \fIsecs\fR
744 field - fortunately most clients do. We recommend setting this to
745 something like 3 or 5. The effect of this is that if one of the
746 failover peers gets into a state where it is responding to failover
747 messages but not responding to some client requests, the other
748 failover peer will take over its client load automatically as the
749 clients retry.
750 .RE
751 .PP
752 The
753 .I auto-partner-down
754 statement
755 .RS 0.25i
756 .PP
757 .B auto-partner-down \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
758 .PP
759 This statement instructs the server to initiate a timed delay upon entering
760 the communications-interrupted state (any situation of being out-of-contact
761 with the remote failover peer). At the conclusion of the timer, the server
762 will automatically enter the partner-down state. This permits the server
763 to allocate leases from the partner's free lease pool after an STOS+MCLT
764 timer expires, which can be dangerous if the partner is in fact operating
765 at the time (the two servers will give conflicting bindings).
766 .PP
767 Think very carefully before enabling this feature. The partner-down and
768 communications-interrupted states are intentionally segregated because
769 there do exist situations where a failover server can fail to communicate
770 with its peer, but still has the ability to receive and reply to requests
771 from DHCP clients. In general, this feature should only be used in those
772 deployments where the failover servers are directly connected to one
773 another, such as by a dedicated hardwired link ("a heartbeat cable").
774 .PP
775 A zero value disables the auto-partner-down feature (also the default), and
776 any positive value indicates the time in seconds to wait before automatically
777 entering partner-down.
778 .RE
779 .PP
780 The Failover pool balance statements.
781 .RS 0.25i
782 .PP
783 \fBmax-lease-misbalance \fIpercentage\fR\fB;\fR
784 \fBmax-lease-ownership \fIpercentage\fR\fB;\fR
785 \fBmin-balance \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
786 \fBmax-balance \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
787 .PP
788 This version of the DHCP Server evaluates pool balance on a schedule,
789 rather than on demand as leases are allocated. The latter approach
790 proved to be slightly klunky when pool misbalanced reach total
791 saturation \(em when any server ran out of leases to assign, it also lost
792 its ability to notice it had run dry.
793 .PP
794 In order to understand pool balance, some elements of its operation
795 first need to be defined. First, there are \'free\' and \'backup\' leases.
796 Both of these are referred to as \'free state leases\'. \'free\' and
797 \'backup\'
798 are \'the free states\' for the purpose of this document. The difference
799 is that only the primary may allocate from \'free\' leases unless under
800 special circumstances, and only the secondary may allocate \'backup\' leases.
801 .PP
802 When pool balance is performed, the only plausible expectation is to
803 provide a 50/50 split of the free state leases between the two servers.
804 This is because no one can predict which server will fail, regardless
805 of the relative load placed upon the two servers, so giving each server
806 half the leases gives both servers the same amount of \'failure endurance\'.
807 Therefore, there is no way to configure any different behaviour, outside of
808 some very small windows we will describe shortly.
809 .PP
810 The first thing calculated on any pool balance run is a value referred to
811 as \'lts\', or "Leases To Send". This, simply, is the difference in the
812 count of free and backup leases, divided by two. For the secondary,
813 it is the difference in the backup and free leases, divided by two.
814 The resulting value is signed: if it is positive, the local server is
815 expected to hand out leases to retain a 50/50 balance. If it is negative,
816 the remote server would need to send leases to balance the pool. Once
817 the lts value reaches zero, the pool is perfectly balanced (give or take
818 one lease in the case of an odd number of total free state leases).
819 .PP
820 The current approach is still something of a hybrid of the old approach,
821 marked by the presence of the \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR statement. This
822 parameter configures what used to be a 10% fixed value in previous versions:
823 if lts is less than free+backup * \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR percent, then
824 the server will skip balancing a given pool (it won't bother moving any
825 leases, even if some leases "should" be moved). The meaning of this value
826 is also somewhat overloaded, however, in that it also governs the estimation
827 of when to attempt to balance the pool (which may then also be skipped over).
828 The oldest leases in the free and backup states are examined. The time
829 they have resided in their respective queues is used as an estimate to
830 indicate how much time it is probable it would take before the leases at
831 the top of the list would be consumed (and thus, how long it would take
832 to use all leases in that state). This percentage is directly multiplied
833 by this time, and fit into the schedule if it falls within
834 the \fBmin-balance\fR and \fBmax-balance\fR configured values. The
835 scheduled pool check time is only moved in a downwards direction, it is
836 never increased. Lastly, if the lts is more than double this number in
837 the negative direction, the local server will \'panic\' and transmit a
838 Failover protocol POOLREQ message, in the hopes that the remote system
839 will be woken up into action.
840 .PP
841 Once the lts value exceeds the \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR percentage of
842 total free state leases as described above, leases are moved to the remote
843 server. This is done in two passes.
844 .PP
845 In the first pass, only leases whose most recent bound client would have
846 been served by the remote server - according to the Load Balance Algorithm
847 (see above \fBsplit\fR and \fBhba\fR configuration statements) - are given
848 away to the peer. This first pass will happily continue to give away leases,
849 decrementing the lts value by one for each, until the lts value has reached
850 the negative of the total number of leases multiplied by
851 the \fBmax-lease-ownership\fR percentage. So it is through this value that
852 you can permit a small misbalance of the lease pools - for the purpose of
853 giving the peer more than a 50/50 share of leases in the hopes that their
854 clients might some day return and be allocated by the peer (operating
855 normally). This process is referred to as \'MAC Address Affinity\', but this
856 is somewhat misnamed: it applies equally to DHCP Client Identifier options.
857 Note also that affinity is applied to leases when they enter the state
858 \'free\' from \'expired\' or \'released\'. In this case also, leases will not
859 be moved from free to backup if the secondary already has more than its
860 share.
861 .PP
862 The second pass is only entered into if the first pass fails to reduce
863 the lts underneath the total number of free state leases multiplied by
864 the \fBmax-lease-ownership\fR percentage. In this pass, the oldest
865 leases are given over to the peer without second thought about the Load
866 Balance Algorithm, and this continues until the lts falls under this
867 value. In this way, the local server will also happily keep a small
868 percentage of the leases that would normally load balance to itself.
869 .PP
870 So, the \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR value acts as a behavioural gate.
871 Smaller values will cause more leases to transition states to balance
872 the pools over time, higher values will decrease the amount of change
873 (but may lead to pool starvation if there's a run on leases).
874 .PP
875 The \fBmax-lease-ownership\fR value permits a small (percentage) skew
876 in the lease balance of a percentage of the total number of free state
877 leases.
878 .PP
879 Finally, the \fBmin-balance\fR and \fBmax-balance\fR make certain that a
880 scheduled rebalance event happens within a reasonable timeframe (not
881 to be thrown off by, for example, a 7 year old free lease).
882 .PP
883 Plausible values for the percentages lie between 0 and 100, inclusive, but
884 values over 50 are indistinguishable from one another (once lts exceeds
885 50% of the free state leases, one server must therefore have 100% of the
886 leases in its respective free state). It is recommended to select
887 a \fBmax-lease-ownership\fR value that is lower than the value selected
888 for the \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR value. \fBmax-lease-ownership\fR
889 defaults to 10, and \fBmax-lease-misbalance\fR defaults to 15.
890 .PP
891 Plausible values for the \fBmin-balance\fR and \fBmax-balance\fR times also
892 range from 0 to (2^32)-1 (or the limit of your local time_t value), but
893 default to values 60 and 3600 respectively (to place balance events between
894 1 minute and 1 hour).
895 .RE
896 .SH CLIENT CLASSING
897 Clients can be separated into classes, and treated differently
898 depending on what class they are in. This separation can be done
899 either with a conditional statement, or with a match statement within
900 the class declaration. It is possible to specify a limit on the
901 total number of clients within a particular class or subclass that may
902 hold leases at one time, and it is possible to specify automatic
903 subclassing based on the contents of the client packet.
904 .PP
905 Classing support for DHCPv6 clients was addded in 4.3.0. It follows
906 the same rules as for DHCPv4 except that support for billing classes
907 has not been added yet.
908 .PP
909 To add clients to classes based on conditional evaluation, you can
910 specify a matching expression in the class statement:
911 .PP
912 .nf
913 class "ras-clients" {
914 match if substring (option dhcp-client-identifier, 1, 3) = "RAS";
915 }
916 .fi
917 .PP
918 Note that whether you use matching expressions or add statements (or
919 both) to classify clients, you must always write a class declaration
920 for any class that you use. If there will be no match statement and
921 no in-scope statements for a class, the declaration should look like
922 this:
923 .PP
924 .nf
925 class "ras-clients" {
926 }
927 .fi
928 .SH SUBCLASSES
929 .PP
930 In addition to classes, it is possible to declare subclasses. A
931 subclass is a class with the same name as a regular class, but with a
932 specific submatch expression which is hashed for quick matching.
933 This is essentially a speed hack - the main difference between five
934 classes with match expressions and one class with five subclasses is
935 that it will be quicker to find the subclasses. Subclasses work as
936 follows:
937 .PP
938 .nf
939 class "allocation-class-1" {
940 match pick-first-value (option dhcp-client-identifier, hardware);
941 }
942
943 class "allocation-class-2" {
944 match pick-first-value (option dhcp-client-identifier, hardware);
945 }
946
947 subclass "allocation-class-1" 1:8:0:2b:4c:39:ad;
948 subclass "allocation-class-2" 1:8:0:2b:a9:cc:e3;
949 subclass "allocation-class-1" 1:0:0:c4:aa:29:44;
950
951 subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
952 pool {
953 allow members of "allocation-class-1";
954 range 10.0.0.11 10.0.0.50;
955 }
956 pool {
957 allow members of "allocation-class-2";
958 range 10.0.0.51 10.0.0.100;
959 }
960 }
961 .fi
962 .PP
963 The data following the class name in the subclass declaration is a
964 constant value to use in matching the match expression for the class.
965 When class matching is done, the server will evaluate the match
966 expression and then look the result up in the hash table. If it
967 finds a match, the client is considered a member of both the class and
968 the subclass.
969 .PP
970 Subclasses can be declared with or without scope. In the above
971 example, the sole purpose of the subclass is to allow some clients
972 access to one address pool, while other clients are given access to
973 the other pool, so these subclasses are declared without scopes. If
974 part of the purpose of the subclass were to define different parameter
975 values for some clients, you might want to declare some subclasses
976 with scopes.
977 .PP
978 In the above example, if you had a single client that needed some
979 configuration parameters, while most didn't, you might write the
980 following subclass declaration for that client:
981 .PP
982 .nf
983 subclass "allocation-class-2" 1:08:00:2b:a1:11:31 {
984 option root-path "samsara:/var/diskless/alphapc";
985 filename "/tftpboot/netbsd.alphapc-diskless";
986 }
987 .fi
988 .PP
989 In this example, we've used subclassing as a way to control address
990 allocation on a per-client basis. However, it's also possible to use
991 subclassing in ways that are not specific to clients - for example, to
992 use the value of the vendor-class-identifier option to determine what
993 values to send in the vendor-encapsulated-options option. An example
994 of this is shown under the VENDOR ENCAPSULATED OPTIONS head in the
995 .B dhcp-options(5)
996 manual page.
997 .SH PER-CLASS LIMITS ON DYNAMIC ADDRESS ALLOCATION
998 .PP
999 You may specify a limit to the number of clients in a class that can
1000 be assigned leases. The effect of this will be to make it difficult
1001 for a new client in a class to get an address. Once a class with
1002 such a limit has reached its limit, the only way a new client in that
1003 class can get a lease is for an existing client to relinquish its
1004 lease, either by letting it expire, or by sending a DHCPRELEASE
1005 packet. Classes with lease limits are specified as follows:
1006 .PP
1007 .nf
1008 class "limited-1" {
1009 lease limit 4;
1010 }
1011 .fi
1012 .PP
1013 This will produce a class in which a maximum of four members may hold
1014 a lease at one time.
1015 .SH SPAWNING CLASSES
1016 .PP
1017 It is possible to declare a
1018 .I spawning class\fR.
1019 A spawning class is a class that automatically produces subclasses
1020 based on what the client sends. The reason that spawning classes
1021 were created was to make it possible to create lease-limited classes
1022 on the fly. The envisioned application is a cable-modem environment
1023 where the ISP wishes to provide clients at a particular site with more
1024 than one IP address, but does not wish to provide such clients with
1025 their own subnet, nor give them an unlimited number of IP addresses
1026 from the network segment to which they are connected.
1027 .PP
1028 Many cable modem head-end systems can be configured to add a Relay
1029 Agent Information option to DHCP packets when relaying them to the
1030 DHCP server. These systems typically add a circuit ID or remote ID
1031 option that uniquely identifies the customer site. To take advantage
1032 of this, you can write a class declaration as follows:
1033 .PP
1034 .nf
1035 class "customer" {
1036 spawn with option agent.circuit-id;
1037 lease limit 4;
1038 }
1039 .fi
1040 .PP
1041 Now whenever a request comes in from a customer site, the circuit ID
1042 option will be checked against the class\'s hash table. If a subclass
1043 is found that matches the circuit ID, the client will be classified in
1044 that subclass and treated accordingly. If no subclass is found
1045 matching the circuit ID, a new one will be created and logged in the
1046 .B dhcpd.leases
1047 file, and the client will be classified in this new class. Once the
1048 client has been classified, it will be treated according to the rules
1049 of the class, including, in this case, being subject to the per-site
1050 limit of four leases.
1051 .PP
1052 The use of the subclass spawning mechanism is not restricted to relay
1053 agent options - this particular example is given only because it is a
1054 fairly straightforward one.
1055 .SH COMBINING MATCH, MATCH IF AND SPAWN WITH
1056 .PP
1057 In some cases, it may be useful to use one expression to assign a
1058 client to a particular class, and a second expression to put it into a
1059 subclass of that class. This can be done by combining the \fBmatch
1060 if\fR and \fBspawn with\fR statements, or the \fBmatch if\fR and
1061 \fBmatch\fR statements. For example:
1062 .PP
1063 .nf
1064 class "jr-cable-modems" {
1065 match if option dhcp-vendor-identifier = "jrcm";
1066 spawn with option agent.circuit-id;
1067 lease limit 4;
1068 }
1069
1070 class "dv-dsl-modems" {
1071 match if option dhcp-vendor-identifier = "dvdsl";
1072 spawn with option agent.circuit-id;
1073 lease limit 16;
1074 }
1075 .fi
1076 .PP
1077 This allows you to have two classes that both have the same \fBspawn
1078 with\fR expression without getting the clients in the two classes
1079 confused with each other.
1080 .SH DYNAMIC DNS UPDATES
1081 .PP
1082 The DHCP server has the ability to dynamically update the Domain Name
1083 System. Within the configuration files, you can define how you want
1084 the Domain Name System to be updated. These updates are RFC 2136
1085 compliant so any DNS server supporting RFC 2136 should be able to
1086 accept updates from the DHCP server.
1087 .PP
1088 There are two DNS schemes implemented. The interim option is
1089 based on draft revisions of the DDNS documents while the standard
1090 option is based on the RFCs for DHCP-DNS interaction and DHCIDs.
1091 A third option, ad-hoc, was deprecated and has now been removed
1092 from the code base. The DHCP server must be configured to use
1093 one of the two currently-supported methods, or not to do DNS updates.
1094 .PP
1095 New installations should use the standard option. Older
1096 installations may want to continue using the interim option for
1097 backwards compatibility with the DNS database until the database
1098 can be updated. This can be done with the
1099 .I ddns-update-style
1100 configuration parameter.
1101 .SH THE DNS UPDATE SCHEME
1102 the interim and standard DNS update schemes operate mostly according
1103 to work from the IETF. The interim version was based on the drafts
1104 in progress at the time while the standard is based on the completed
1105 RFCs. The standard RFCs are:
1106 .PP
1107 .nf
1108 .ce 3
1109 RFC 4701 (updated by RF5494)
1110 RFC 4702
1111 RFC 4703
1112 .fi
1113 .PP
1114 And the corresponding drafts were:
1115 .PP
1116 .nf
1117 .ce 3
1118 draft-ietf-dnsext-dhcid-rr-??.txt
1119 draft-ietf-dhc-fqdn-option-??.txt
1120 draft-ietf-dhc-ddns-resolution-??.txt
1121 .fi
1122 .PP
1123 The basic framework for the two schemes is similar with the main
1124 material difference being that a DHCID RR is used in the standard
1125 version while the interim versions uses a TXT RR. The format
1126 of the TXT record bears a resemblance to the DHCID RR but it is not
1127 equivalent (MD5 vs SHA2, field length differences etc).
1128 .PP
1129 In these two schemes the DHCP server does not necessarily
1130 always update both the A and the PTR records. The FQDN option
1131 includes a flag which, when sent by the client, indicates that the
1132 client wishes to update its own A record. In that case, the server
1133 can be configured either to honor the client\'s intentions or ignore
1134 them. This is done with the statement \fIallow client-updates;\fR or
1135 the statement \fIignore client-updates;\fR. By default, client
1136 updates are allowed.
1137 .PP
1138 If the server is configured to allow client updates, then if the
1139 client sends a fully-qualified domain name in the FQDN option, the
1140 server will use that name the client sent in the FQDN option to update
1141 the PTR record. For example, let us say that the client is a visitor
1142 from the "radish.org" domain, whose hostname is "jschmoe". The
1143 server is for the "example.org" domain. The DHCP client indicates in
1144 the FQDN option that its FQDN is "jschmoe.radish.org.". It also
1145 indicates that it wants to update its own A record. The DHCP server
1146 therefore does not attempt to set up an A record for the client, but
1147 does set up a PTR record for the IP address that it assigns the
1148 client, pointing at jschmoe.radish.org. Once the DHCP client has an
1149 IP address, it can update its own A record, assuming that the
1150 "radish.org" DNS server will allow it to do so.
1151 .PP
1152 If the server is configured not to allow client updates, or if the
1153 client doesn\'t want to do its own update, the server will simply
1154 choose a name for the client from either the \fBfqdn\fR option (if present)
1155 or the hostname option (if present). It will use its own
1156 domain name for the client. It will then update both the A and PTR
1157 record, using the name that it chose for the client. If the client
1158 sends a fully-qualified domain name in the \fBfqdn\fR option, the
1159 server uses only the leftmost part of the domain name - in the
1160 example above, "jschmoe" instead of "jschmoe.radish.org".
1161 .PP
1162 Further, if the \fIignore client-updates;\fR directive is used, then
1163 the server will in addition send a response in the DHCP packet, using
1164 the FQDN Option, that implies to the client that it should perform its
1165 own updates if it chooses to do so. With \fIdeny client-updates;\fR, a
1166 response is sent which indicates the client may not perform updates.
1167 .PP
1168 Also, if the
1169 .I use-host-decl-names
1170 configuration option is enabled, then the host declaration\'s
1171 .I hostname
1172 will be used in place of the
1173 .I hostname
1174 option, and the same rules will apply as described above.
1175 .PP
1176 Both the standard and interim options also include a method to
1177 allow more than one DHCP server to update the DNS database without
1178 accidentally deleting A records that shouldn\'t be deleted nor failing
1179 to add A records that should be added. For the standard option the
1180 method works as follows:
1181 .PP
1182 When the DHCP server issues a client a new lease, it creates a text
1183 string that is an SHA hash over the DHCP client\'s identification (see
1184 RFCs 4701 & 4702 for details). The update attempts to add an A
1185 record with the name the server chose and a DHCID record containing the
1186 hashed identifier string (hashid). If this update succeeds, the
1187 server is done.
1188 .PP
1189 If the update fails because the A record already exists, then the DHCP
1190 server attempts to add the A record with the prerequisite that there
1191 must be a DHCID record in the same name as the new A record, and that
1192 DHCID record\'s contents must be equal to hashid. If this update
1193 succeeds, then the client has its A record and PTR record. If it
1194 fails, then the name the client has been assigned (or requested) is in
1195 use, and can\'t be used by the client. At this point the DHCP server
1196 gives up trying to do a DNS update for the client until the client
1197 chooses a new name.
1198 .PP
1199 The server also does not update very aggressively. Because each
1200 DNS update involves a round trip to the DNS server, there is a cost
1201 associated with doing updates even if they do not actually modify
1202 the DNS database. So the DHCP server tracks whether or not it has
1203 updated the record in the past (this information is stored on the
1204 lease) and does not attempt to update records that it
1205 thinks it has already updated.
1206 .PP
1207 This can lead to cases where the DHCP server adds a record, and then
1208 the record is deleted through some other mechanism, but the server
1209 never again updates the DNS because it thinks the data is already
1210 there. In this case the data can be removed from the lease through
1211 operator intervention, and once this has been done, the DNS will be
1212 updated the next time the client renews.
1213 .PP
1214 The interim DNS update scheme was written before the RFCs were finalized
1215 and does not quite follow them. The RFCs call for a new DHCID RRtype
1216 while he interim DNS update scheme uses a TXT record. In addition
1217 the ddns-resolution draft called for the DHCP server to put a DHCID RR
1218 on the PTR record, but the \fIinterim\fR update method does not do this.
1219 In the final RFC this requirement was relaxed such that a server may
1220 add a DHCID RR to the PTR record.
1221 .PP
1222 .SH DYNAMIC DNS UPDATE SECURITY
1223 .PP
1224 When you set your DNS server up to allow updates from the DHCP server,
1225 you may be exposing it to unauthorized updates. To avoid this, you
1226 should use TSIG signatures - a method of cryptographically signing
1227 updates using a shared secret key. As long as you protect the
1228 secrecy of this key, your updates should also be secure. Note,
1229 however, that the DHCP protocol itself provides no security, and that
1230 clients can therefore provide information to the DHCP server which the
1231 DHCP server will then use in its updates, with the constraints
1232 described previously.
1233 .PP
1234 The DNS server must be configured to allow updates for any zone that
1235 the DHCP server will be updating. For example, let us say that
1236 clients in the sneedville.edu domain will be assigned addresses on the
1237 10.10.17.0/24 subnet. In that case, you will need a key declaration
1238 for the TSIG key you will be using, and also two zone declarations -
1239 one for the zone containing A records that will be updates and one for
1240 the zone containing PTR records - for ISC BIND, something like this:
1241 .PP
1242 .nf
1243 key DHCP_UPDATER {
1244 algorithm HMAC-MD5.SIG-ALG.REG.INT;
1245 secret pRP5FapFoJ95JEL06sv4PQ==;
1246 };
1247
1248 zone "example.org" {
1249 type master;
1250 file "example.org.db";
1251 allow-update { key DHCP_UPDATER; };
1252 };
1253
1254 zone "17.10.10.in-addr.arpa" {
1255 type master;
1256 file "10.10.17.db";
1257 allow-update { key DHCP_UPDATER; };
1258 };
1259 .fi
1260 .PP
1261 You will also have to configure your DHCP server to do updates to
1262 these zones. To do so, you need to add something like this to your
1263 dhcpd.conf file:
1264 .PP
1265 .nf
1266 key DHCP_UPDATER {
1267 algorithm HMAC-MD5.SIG-ALG.REG.INT;
1268 secret pRP5FapFoJ95JEL06sv4PQ==;
1269 };
1270
1271 zone EXAMPLE.ORG. {
1272 primary 127.0.0.1;
1273 key DHCP_UPDATER;
1274 }
1275
1276 zone 17.127.10.in-addr.arpa. {
1277 primary 127.0.0.1;
1278 key DHCP_UPDATER;
1279 }
1280 .fi
1281 .PP
1282 The \fIprimary\fR statement specifies the IP address of the name
1283 server whose zone information is to be updated. In addition to
1284 the \fIprimary\fR statement there are also the \fIprimary6\fR ,
1285 \fIsecondary\fR and \fIsecondary6\fR statements. The \fIprimary6\fR
1286 statement specifies an IPv6 address for the name server. The
1287 secondaries provide for additional addresses for name servers
1288 to be used if the primary does not respond. The number of name
1289 servers the DDNS code will attempt to use before giving up
1290 is limited and is currently set to three.
1291 .PP
1292 Note that the zone declarations have to correspond to authority
1293 records in your name server - in the above example, there must be an
1294 SOA record for "example.org." and for "17.10.10.in-addr.arpa.". For
1295 example, if there were a subdomain "foo.example.org" with no separate
1296 SOA, you could not write a zone declaration for "foo.example.org."
1297 Also keep in mind that zone names in your DHCP configuration should end in a
1298 "."; this is the preferred syntax. If you do not end your zone name in a
1299 ".", the DHCP server will figure it out. Also note that in the DHCP
1300 configuration, zone names are not encapsulated in quotes where there are in
1301 the DNS configuration.
1302 .PP
1303 You should choose your own secret key, of course. The ISC BIND 9
1304 distribution comes with a program for generating secret keys called
1305 dnssec-keygen. If you are using BIND 9\'s
1306 dnssec-keygen, the above key would be created as follows:
1307 .PP
1308 .nf
1309 dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 128 -n USER DHCP_UPDATER
1310 .fi
1311 .PP
1312 You may wish to enable logging of DNS updates on your DNS server.
1313 To do so, you might write a logging statement like the following:
1314 .PP
1315 .nf
1316 logging {
1317 channel update_debug {
1318 file "/var/log/update-debug.log";
1319 severity debug 3;
1320 print-category yes;
1321 print-severity yes;
1322 print-time yes;
1323 };
1324 channel security_info {
1325 file "/var/log/named-auth.info";
1326 severity info;
1327 print-category yes;
1328 print-severity yes;
1329 print-time yes;
1330 };
1331
1332 category update { update_debug; };
1333 category security { security_info; };
1334 };
1335 .fi
1336 .PP
1337 You must create the /var/log/named-auth.info and
1338 /var/log/update-debug.log files before starting the name server. For
1339 more information on configuring ISC BIND, consult the documentation
1340 that accompanies it.
1341 .SH REFERENCE: EVENTS
1342 .PP
1343 There are three kinds of events that can happen regarding a lease, and
1344 it is possible to declare statements that occur when any of these
1345 events happen. These events are the commit event, when the server
1346 has made a commitment of a certain lease to a client, the release
1347 event, when the client has released the server from its commitment,
1348 and the expiry event, when the commitment expires.
1349 .PP
1350 To declare a set of statements to execute when an event happens, you
1351 must use the \fBon\fR statement, followed by the name of the event,
1352 followed by a series of statements to execute when the event happens,
1353 enclosed in braces.
1354 .SH REFERENCE: DECLARATIONS
1355 .PP
1356 .B The
1357 .I include
1358 .B statement
1359 .PP
1360 .nf
1361 \fBinclude\fR \fI"filename"\fR\fB;\fR
1362 .fi
1363 .PP
1364 The \fIinclude\fR statement is used to read in a named file, and process
1365 the contents of that file as though it were entered in place of the
1366 include statement.
1367 .PP
1368 .B The
1369 .I shared-network
1370 .B statement
1371 .PP
1372 .nf
1373 \fBshared-network\fR \fIname\fR \fB{\fR
1374 [ \fIparameters\fR ]
1375 [ \fIdeclarations\fR ]
1376 \fB}\fR
1377 .fi
1378 .PP
1379 The \fIshared-network\fR statement is used to inform the DHCP server
1380 that some IP subnets actually share the same physical network. Any
1381 subnets in a shared network should be declared within a
1382 \fIshared-network\fR statement. Parameters specified in the
1383 \fIshared-network\fR statement will be used when booting clients on
1384 those subnets unless parameters provided at the subnet or host level
1385 override them. If any subnet in a shared network has addresses
1386 available for dynamic allocation, those addresses are collected into a
1387 common pool for that shared network and assigned to clients as needed.
1388 There is no way to distinguish on which subnet of a shared network a
1389 client should boot.
1390 .PP
1391 .I Name
1392 should be the name of the shared network. This name is used when
1393 printing debugging messages, so it should be descriptive for the
1394 shared network. The name may have the syntax of a valid domain name
1395 (although it will never be used as such), or it may be any arbitrary
1396 name, enclosed in quotes.
1397 .PP
1398 .B The
1399 .I subnet
1400 .B statement
1401 .PP
1402 .nf
1403 \fBsubnet\fR \fIsubnet-number\fR \fBnetmask\fR \fInetmask\fR \fB{\fR
1404 [ \fIparameters\fR ]
1405 [ \fIdeclarations\fR ]
1406 \fB}\fR
1407 .fi
1408 .PP
1409 The \fIsubnet\fR statement is used to provide dhcpd with enough
1410 information to tell whether or not an IP address is on that subnet.
1411 It may also be used to provide subnet-specific parameters and to
1412 specify what addresses may be dynamically allocated to clients booting
1413 on that subnet. Such addresses are specified using the \fIrange\fR
1414 declaration.
1415 .PP
1416 The
1417 .I subnet-number
1418 should be an IP address or domain name which resolves to the subnet
1419 number of the subnet being described. The
1420 .I netmask
1421 should be an IP address or domain name which resolves to the subnet mask
1422 of the subnet being described. The subnet number, together with the
1423 netmask, are sufficient to determine whether any given IP address is
1424 on the specified subnet.
1425 .PP
1426 Although a netmask must be given with every subnet declaration, it is
1427 recommended that if there is any variance in subnet masks at a site, a
1428 subnet-mask option statement be used in each subnet declaration to set
1429 the desired subnet mask, since any subnet-mask option statement will
1430 override the subnet mask declared in the subnet statement.
1431 .PP
1432 .B The
1433 .I subnet6
1434 .B statement
1435 .PP
1436 .nf
1437 \fBsubnet6\fR \fIsubnet6-number\fR \fB{\fR
1438 [ \fIparameters\fR ]
1439 [ \fIdeclarations\fR ]
1440 \fB}\fR
1441 .fi
1442 .PP
1443 The \fIsubnet6\fR statement is used to provide dhcpd with enough
1444 information to tell whether or not an IPv6 address is on that subnet6.
1445 It may also be used to provide subnet-specific parameters and to
1446 specify what addresses may be dynamically allocated to clients booting
1447 on that subnet.
1448 .PP
1449 The
1450 .I subnet6-number
1451 should be an IPv6 network identifier, specified as ip6-address/bits.
1452 .PP
1453 .B The
1454 .I range
1455 .B statement
1456 .PP
1457 .nf
1458 .B range\fR [ \fBdynamic-bootp\fR ] \fIlow-address\fR [ \fIhigh-address\fR]\fB;\fR
1459 .fi
1460 .PP
1461 For any subnet on which addresses will be assigned dynamically, there
1462 must be at least one \fIrange\fR statement. The range statement
1463 gives the lowest and highest IP addresses in a range. All IP
1464 addresses in the range should be in the subnet in which the
1465 \fIrange\fR statement is declared. The \fIdynamic-bootp\fR flag may
1466 be specified if addresses in the specified range may be dynamically
1467 assigned to BOOTP clients as well as DHCP clients. When specifying a
1468 single address, \fIhigh-address\fR can be omitted.
1469 .PP
1470 .B The
1471 .I range6
1472 .B statement
1473 .PP
1474 .nf
1475 .B range6\fR \fIlow-address\fR \fIhigh-address\fR\fB;\fR
1476 .B range6\fR \fIsubnet6-number\fR\fB;\fR
1477 .B range6\fR \fIsubnet6-number\fR \fBtemporary\fR\fB;\fR
1478 .B range6\fR \fIaddress\fR \fBtemporary\fR\fB;\fR
1479 .fi
1480 .PP
1481 For any IPv6 subnet6 on which addresses will be assigned dynamically, there
1482 must be at least one \fIrange6\fR statement. The \fIrange6\fR statement
1483 can either be the lowest and highest IPv6 addresses in a \fIrange6\fR, or
1484 use CIDR notation, specified as ip6-address/bits. All IP addresses
1485 in the \fIrange6\fR should be in the subnet6 in which the
1486 \fIrange6\fR statement is declared.
1487 .PP
1488 The \fItemporary\fR variant makes the prefix (by default on 64 bits) available
1489 for temporary (RFC 4941) addresses. A new address per prefix in the shared
1490 network is computed at each request with an IA_TA option. Release and Confirm
1491 ignores temporary addresses.
1492 .PP
1493 Any IPv6 addresses given to hosts with \fIfixed-address6\fR are excluded
1494 from the \fIrange6\fR, as are IPv6 addresses on the server itself.
1495 .PP
1496 .PP
1497 .B The
1498 .I prefix6
1499 .B statement
1500 .PP
1501 .nf
1502 .B prefix6\fR \fIlow-address\fR \fIhigh-address\fR \fB/\fR \fIbits\fR\fB;\fR
1503 .fi
1504 .PP
1505 The \fIprefix6\fR is the \fIrange6\fR equivalent for Prefix Delegation
1506 (RFC 3633). Prefixes of \fIbits\fR length are assigned between
1507 \fIlow-address\fR and \fIhigh-address\fR.
1508 .PP
1509 Any IPv6 prefixes given to static entries (hosts) with \fIfixed-prefix6\fR
1510 are excluded from the \fIprefix6\fR.
1511 .PP
1512 This statement is currently global but it should have a shared-network scope.
1513 .PP
1514 .B The
1515 .I host
1516 .B statement
1517 .PP
1518 .nf
1519 \fBhost\fR \fIhostname\fR {
1520 [ \fIparameters\fR ]
1521 [ \fIdeclarations\fR ]
1522 \fB}\fR
1523 .fi
1524 .PP
1525 The
1526 .B host
1527 declaration provides a scope in which to provide configuration information about
1528 a specific client, and also provides a way to assign a client a fixed address.
1529 The host declaration provides a way for the DHCP server to identify a DHCP or
1530 BOOTP client, and also a way to assign the client a static IP address.
1531 .PP
1532 If it is desirable to be able to boot a DHCP or BOOTP client on more than one
1533 subnet with fixed addresses, more than one address may be specified in the
1534 .I fixed-address
1535 declaration, or more than one
1536 .B host
1537 statement may be specified matching the same client.
1538 .PP
1539 If client-specific boot parameters must change based on the network
1540 to which the client is attached, then multiple
1541 .B host
1542 declarations should be used. The
1543 .B host
1544 declarations will only match a client if one of their
1545 .I fixed-address
1546 statements is viable on the subnet (or shared network) where the client is
1547 attached. Conversely, for a
1548 .B host
1549 declaration to match a client being allocated a dynamic address, it must not
1550 have any
1551 .I fixed-address
1552 statements. You may therefore need a mixture of
1553 .B host
1554 declarations for any given client...some having
1555 .I fixed-address
1556 statements, others without.
1557 .PP
1558 .I hostname
1559 should be a name identifying the host. If a \fIhostname\fR option is
1560 not specified for the host, \fIhostname\fR is used.
1561 .PP
1562 \fIHost\fR declarations are matched to actual DHCP or BOOTP clients
1563 by matching the \fRdhcp-client-identifier\fR option specified in the
1564 \fIhost\fR declaration to the one supplied by the client, or, if the
1565 \fIhost\fR declaration or the client does not provide a
1566 \fRdhcp-client-identifier\fR option, by matching the \fIhardware\fR
1567 parameter in the \fIhost\fR declaration to the network hardware
1568 address supplied by the client. BOOTP clients do not normally
1569 provide a \fIdhcp-client-identifier\fR, so the hardware address must
1570 be used for all clients that may boot using the BOOTP protocol.
1571 .PP
1572 DHCPv6 servers can use the \fIhost-identifier option\fR parameter in
1573 the \fIhost\fR declaration, and specify any option with a fixed value
1574 to identify hosts.
1575 .PP
1576 Please be aware that
1577 .B only
1578 the \fIdhcp-client-identifier\fR option and the hardware address can be
1579 used to match a host declaration, or the \fIhost-identifier option\fR
1580 parameter for DHCPv6 servers. For example, it is not possible to
1581 match a host declaration to a \fIhost-name\fR option. This is
1582 because the host-name option cannot be guaranteed to be unique for any
1583 given client, whereas both the hardware address and
1584 \fIdhcp-client-identifier\fR option are at least theoretically
1585 guaranteed to be unique to a given client.
1586 .PP
1587 .B The
1588 .I group
1589 .B statement
1590 .PP
1591 .nf
1592 \fBgroup\fR {
1593 [ \fIparameters\fR ]
1594 [ \fIdeclarations\fR ]
1595 \fB}\fR
1596 .fi
1597 .PP
1598 The group statement is used simply to apply one or more parameters to
1599 a group of declarations. It can be used to group hosts, shared
1600 networks, subnets, or even other groups.
1601 .SH REFERENCE: ALLOW AND DENY
1602 The
1603 .I allow
1604 and
1605 .I deny
1606 statements can be used to control the response of the DHCP server to
1607 various sorts of requests. The allow and deny keywords actually have
1608 different meanings depending on the context. In a pool context, these
1609 keywords can be used to set up access lists for address allocation
1610 pools. In other contexts, the keywords simply control general server
1611 behavior with respect to clients based on scope. In a non-pool
1612 context, the
1613 .I ignore
1614 keyword can be used in place of the
1615 .I deny
1616 keyword to prevent logging of denied requests.
1617 .PP
1618 .SH ALLOW DENY AND IGNORE IN SCOPE
1619 The following usages of allow and deny will work in any scope,
1620 although it is not recommended that they be used in pool
1621 declarations.
1622 .PP
1623 .B The
1624 .I unknown-clients
1625 .B keyword
1626 .PP
1627 \fBallow unknown-clients;\fR
1628 \fBdeny unknown-clients;\fR
1629 \fBignore unknown-clients;\fR
1630 .PP
1631 The \fBunknown-clients\fR flag is used to tell dhcpd whether
1632 or not to dynamically assign addresses to unknown clients. Dynamic
1633 address assignment to unknown clients is \fBallow\fRed by default.
1634 An unknown client is simply a client that has no host declaration.
1635 .PP
1636 The use of this option is now \fIdeprecated\fR. If you are trying to
1637 restrict access on your network to known clients, you should use \fBdeny
1638 unknown-clients;\fR inside of your address pool, as described under the
1639 heading ALLOW AND DENY WITHIN POOL DECLARATIONS.
1640 .PP
1641 .B The
1642 .I bootp
1643 .B keyword
1644 .PP
1645 \fBallow bootp;\fR
1646 \fBdeny bootp;\fR
1647 \fBignore bootp;\fR
1648 .PP
1649 The \fBbootp\fR flag is used to tell dhcpd whether
1650 or not to respond to bootp queries. Bootp queries are \fBallow\fRed
1651 by default.
1652 .PP
1653 .B The
1654 .I booting
1655 .B keyword
1656 .PP
1657 \fBallow booting;\fR
1658 \fBdeny booting;\fR
1659 \fBignore booting;\fR
1660 .PP
1661 The \fBbooting\fR flag is used to tell dhcpd whether or not to respond
1662 to queries from a particular client. This keyword only has meaning
1663 when it appears in a host declaration. By default, booting is
1664 \fBallow\fRed, but if it is disabled for a particular client, then
1665 that client will not be able to get an address from the DHCP server.
1666 .PP
1667 .B The
1668 .I duplicates
1669 .B keyword
1670 .PP
1671 \fBallow duplicates;\fR
1672 \fBdeny duplicates;\fR
1673 .PP
1674 Host declarations can match client messages based on the DHCP Client
1675 Identifier option or based on the client's network hardware type and
1676 MAC address. If the MAC address is used, the host declaration will
1677 match any client with that MAC address - even clients with different
1678 client identifiers. This doesn't normally happen, but is possible
1679 when one computer has more than one operating system installed on it -
1680 for example, Microsoft Windows and NetBSD or Linux.
1681 .PP
1682 The \fBduplicates\fR flag tells the DHCP server that if a request is
1683 received from a client that matches the MAC address of a host
1684 declaration, any other leases matching that MAC address should be
1685 discarded by the server, even if the UID is not the same. This is a
1686 violation of the DHCP protocol, but can prevent clients whose client
1687 identifiers change regularly from holding many leases at the same time.
1688 By default, duplicates are \fBallow\fRed.
1689 .PP
1690 .B The
1691 .I declines
1692 .B keyword
1693 .PP
1694 \fBallow declines;\fR
1695 \fBdeny declines;\fR
1696 \fBignore declines;\fR
1697 .PP
1698 The DHCPDECLINE message is used by DHCP clients to indicate that the
1699 lease the server has offered is not valid. When the server receives
1700 a DHCPDECLINE for a particular address, it normally abandons that
1701 address, assuming that some unauthorized system is using it.
1702 Unfortunately, a malicious or buggy client can, using DHCPDECLINE
1703 messages, completely exhaust the DHCP server's allocation pool. The
1704 server will reclaim these leases, but while the client is running
1705 through the pool, it may cause serious thrashing in the DNS, and it
1706 will also cause the DHCP server to forget old DHCP client address
1707 allocations.
1708 .PP
1709 The \fBdeclines\fR flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to honor
1710 DHCPDECLINE messages. If it is set to \fBdeny\fR or \fBignore\fR in
1711 a particular scope, the DHCP server will not respond to DHCPDECLINE
1712 messages.
1713 .PP
1714 .B The
1715 .I client-updates
1716 .B keyword
1717 .PP
1718 \fBallow client-updates;\fR
1719 \fBdeny client-updates;\fR
1720 .PP
1721 The \fBclient-updates\fR flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to
1722 honor the client's intention to do its own update of its A record.
1723 This is only relevant when doing \fIinterim\fR DNS updates. See the
1724 documentation under the heading THE INTERIM DNS UPDATE SCHEME for
1725 details.
1726 .PP
1727 .B The
1728 .I leasequery
1729 .B keyword
1730 .PP
1731 \fBallow leasequery;\fR
1732 \fBdeny leasequery;\fR
1733 .PP
1734 The \fBleasequery\fR flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to
1735 answer DHCPLEASEQUERY packets. The answer to a DHCPLEASEQUERY packet
1736 includes information about a specific lease, such as when it was
1737 issued and when it will expire. By default, the server will not
1738 respond to these packets.
1739 .SH ALLOW AND DENY WITHIN POOL DECLARATIONS
1740 .PP
1741 The uses of the allow and deny keywords shown in the previous section
1742 work pretty much the same way whether the client is sending a
1743 DHCPDISCOVER or a DHCPREQUEST message - an address will be allocated
1744 to the client (either the old address it's requesting, or a new
1745 address) and then that address will be tested to see if it's okay to
1746 let the client have it. If the client requested it, and it's not
1747 okay, the server will send a DHCPNAK message. Otherwise, the server
1748 will simply not respond to the client. If it is okay to give the
1749 address to the client, the server will send a DHCPACK message.
1750 .PP
1751 The primary motivation behind pool declarations is to have address
1752 allocation pools whose allocation policies are different. A client
1753 may be denied access to one pool, but allowed access to another pool
1754 on the same network segment. In order for this to work, access
1755 control has to be done during address allocation, not after address
1756 allocation is done.
1757 .PP
1758 When a DHCPREQUEST message is processed, address allocation simply
1759 consists of looking up the address the client is requesting and seeing
1760 if it's still available for the client. If it is, then the DHCP
1761 server checks both the address pool permit lists and the relevant
1762 in-scope allow and deny statements to see if it's okay to give the
1763 lease to the client. In the case of a DHCPDISCOVER message, the
1764 allocation process is done as described previously in the ADDRESS
1765 ALLOCATION section.
1766 .PP
1767 When declaring permit lists for address allocation pools, the
1768 following syntaxes are recognized following the allow or deny keywords:
1769 .PP
1770 \fBknown-clients;\fR
1771 .PP
1772 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1773 this pool to any client that has a host declaration (i.e., is known).
1774 A client is known if it has a host declaration in \fIany\fR scope, not
1775 just the current scope.
1776 .PP
1777 \fBunknown-clients;\fR
1778 .PP
1779 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1780 this pool to any client that has no host declaration (i.e., is not
1781 known).
1782 .PP
1783 \fBmembers of "\fRclass\fB";\fR
1784 .PP
1785 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1786 this pool to any client that is a member of the named class.
1787 .PP
1788 \fBdynamic bootp clients;\fR
1789 .PP
1790 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1791 this pool to any bootp client.
1792 .PP
1793 \fBauthenticated clients;\fR
1794 .PP
1795 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1796 this pool to any client that has been authenticated using the DHCP
1797 authentication protocol. This is not yet supported.
1798 .PP
1799 \fBunauthenticated clients;\fR
1800 .PP
1801 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1802 this pool to any client that has not been authenticated using the DHCP
1803 authentication protocol. This is not yet supported.
1804 .PP
1805 \fBall clients;\fR
1806 .PP
1807 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1808 this pool to all clients. This can be used when you want to write a
1809 pool declaration for some reason, but hold it in reserve, or when you
1810 want to renumber your network quickly, and thus want the server to
1811 force all clients that have been allocated addresses from this pool to
1812 obtain new addresses immediately when they next renew.
1813 .PP
1814 \fBafter \fItime\fR\fB;\fR
1815 .PP
1816 If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
1817 this pool after a given date. This can be used when you want to move
1818 clients from one pool to another. The server adjusts the regular lease
1819 time so that the latest expiry time is at the given time+min-lease-time.
1820 A short min-lease-time enforces a step change, whereas a longer
1821 min-lease-time allows for a gradual change.
1822 \fItime\fR is either second since epoch, or a UTC time string e.g.
1823 4 2007/08/24 09:14:32 or a string with time zone offset in seconds
1824 e.g. 4 2007/08/24 11:14:32 -7200
1825 .SH REFERENCE: PARAMETERS
1826 The
1827 .I adaptive-lease-time-threshold
1828 statement
1829 .RS 0.25i
1830 .PP
1831 .B adaptive-lease-time-threshold \fIpercentage\fR\fB;\fR
1832 .PP
1833 When the number of allocated leases within a pool rises above
1834 the \fIpercentage\fR given in this statement, the DHCP server decreases
1835 the lease length for new clients within this pool to \fImin-lease-time\fR
1836 seconds. Clients renewing an already valid (long) leases get at least the
1837 remaining time from the current lease. Since the leases expire faster,
1838 the server may either recover more quickly or avoid pool exhaustion
1839 entirely. Once the number of allocated leases drop below the threshold,
1840 the server reverts back to normal lease times. Valid percentages are
1841 between 1 and 99.
1842 .RE
1843 .PP
1844 The
1845 .I always-broadcast
1846 statement
1847 .RS 0.25i
1848 .PP
1849 .B always-broadcast \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
1850 .PP
1851 The DHCP and BOOTP protocols both require DHCP and BOOTP clients to
1852 set the broadcast bit in the flags field of the BOOTP message header.
1853 Unfortunately, some DHCP and BOOTP clients do not do this, and
1854 therefore may not receive responses from the DHCP server. The DHCP
1855 server can be made to always broadcast its responses to clients by
1856 setting this flag to \'on\' for the relevant scope; relevant scopes would be
1857 inside a conditional statement, as a parameter for a class, or as a parameter
1858 for a host declaration. To avoid creating excess broadcast traffic on your
1859 network, we recommend that you restrict the use of this option to as few
1860 clients as possible. For example, the Microsoft DHCP client is known not
1861 to have this problem, as are the OpenTransport and ISC DHCP clients.
1862 .RE
1863 .PP
1864 The
1865 .I always-reply-rfc1048
1866 statement
1867 .RS 0.25i
1868 .PP
1869 .B always-reply-rfc1048 \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
1870 .PP
1871 Some BOOTP clients expect RFC1048-style responses, but do not follow
1872 RFC1048 when sending their requests. You can tell that a client is
1873 having this problem if it is not getting the options you have
1874 configured for it and if you see in the server log the message
1875 "(non-rfc1048)" printed with each BOOTREQUEST that is logged.
1876 .PP
1877 If you want to send rfc1048 options to such a client, you can set the
1878 .B always-reply-rfc1048
1879 option in that client's host declaration, and the DHCP server will
1880 respond with an RFC-1048-style vendor options field. This flag can
1881 be set in any scope, and will affect all clients covered by that
1882 scope.
1883 .RE
1884 .PP
1885 The
1886 .I authoritative
1887 statement
1888 .RS 0.25i
1889 .PP
1890 .B authoritative;
1891 .PP
1892 .B not authoritative;
1893 .PP
1894 The DHCP server will normally assume that the configuration
1895 information about a given network segment is not known to be correct
1896 and is not authoritative. This is so that if a naive user installs a
1897 DHCP server not fully understanding how to configure it, it does not
1898 send spurious DHCPNAK messages to clients that have obtained addresses
1899 from a legitimate DHCP server on the network.
1900 .PP
1901 Network administrators setting up authoritative DHCP servers for their
1902 networks should always write \fBauthoritative;\fR at the top of their
1903 configuration file to indicate that the DHCP server \fIshould\fR send
1904 DHCPNAK messages to misconfigured clients. If this is not done,
1905 clients will be unable to get a correct IP address after changing
1906 subnets until their old lease has expired, which could take quite a
1907 long time.
1908 .PP
1909 Usually, writing \fBauthoritative;\fR at the top level of the file
1910 should be sufficient. However, if a DHCP server is to be set up so
1911 that it is aware of some networks for which it is authoritative and
1912 some networks for which it is not, it may be more appropriate to
1913 declare authority on a per-network-segment basis.
1914 .PP
1915 Note that the most specific scope for which the concept of authority
1916 makes any sense is the physical network segment - either a
1917 shared-network statement or a subnet statement that is not contained
1918 within a shared-network statement. It is not meaningful to specify
1919 that the server is authoritative for some subnets within a shared
1920 network, but not authoritative for others, nor is it meaningful to
1921 specify that the server is authoritative for some host declarations
1922 and not others.
1923 .RE
1924 .PP
1925 The \fIboot-unknown-clients\fR statement
1926 .RS 0.25i
1927 .PP
1928 .B boot-unknown-clients \fIflag\fB;\fR
1929 .PP
1930 If the \fIboot-unknown-clients\fR statement is present and has a value
1931 of \fIfalse\fR or \fIoff\fR, then clients for which there is no
1932 .I host
1933 declaration will not be allowed to obtain IP addresses. If this
1934 statement is not present or has a value of \fItrue\fR or \fIon\fR,
1935 then clients without host declarations will be allowed to obtain IP
1936 addresses, as long as those addresses are not restricted by
1937 .I allow
1938 and \fIdeny\fR statements within their \fIpool\fR declarations.
1939 .RE
1940 .PP
1941 The \fIdb-time-format\fR statement
1942 .RS 0.25i
1943 .PP
1944 .B db-time-format \fR[ \fIdefault\fR | \fIlocal\fR ] \fB;\fR
1945 .PP
1946 The DHCP server software outputs several timestamps when writing leases to
1947 persistent storage. This configuration parameter selects one of two output
1948 formats. The \fIdefault\fR format prints the day, date, and time in UTC,
1949 while the \fIlocal\fR format prints the system seconds-since-epoch, and
1950 helpfully provides the day and time in the system timezone in a comment.
1951 The time formats are described in detail in the dhcpd.leases(5) manpage.
1952 .RE
1953 .PP
1954 The \fIddns-hostname\fR statement
1955 .RS 0.25i
1956 .PP
1957 .B ddns-hostname \fIname\fB;\fR
1958 .PP
1959 The \fIname\fR parameter should be the hostname that will be used in
1960 setting up the client's A and PTR records. If no \fIddns-hostname\fR is
1961 specified in scope, then the server will derive the hostname
1962 automatically, using an algorithm that varies for each of the
1963 different update methods.
1964 .RE
1965 .PP
1966 The \fIddns-domainname\fR statement
1967 .RS 0.25i
1968 .PP
1969 .B ddns-domainname \fIname\fB;\fR
1970 .PP
1971 The \fIname\fR parameter should be the domain name that will be
1972 appended to the client's hostname to form a fully-qualified
1973 domain-name (FQDN).
1974 .RE
1975 .PP
1976 The \fIddns-rev-domainname\fR statement
1977 .RS 0.25i
1978 .PP
1979 .B ddns-rev-domainname \fIname\fB;\fR
1980 The \fIname\fR parameter should be the domain name that will be
1981 appended to the client's reversed IP address to produce a name for use
1982 in the client's PTR record. By default, this is "in-addr.arpa.", but
1983 the default can be overridden here.
1984 .PP
1985 The reversed IP address to which this domain name is appended is
1986 always the IP address of the client, in dotted quad notation, reversed
1987 - for example, if the IP address assigned to the client is
1988 10.17.92.74, then the reversed IP address is 74.92.17.10. So a
1989 client with that IP address would, by default, be given a PTR record
1990 of 10.17.92.74.in-addr.arpa.
1991 .RE
1992 .PP
1993 The \fIddns-update-style\fR parameter
1994 .RS 0.25i
1995 .PP
1996 .B ddns-update-style \fIstyle\fB;\fR
1997 .PP
1998 The
1999 .I style
2000 parameter must be one of \fBstandard\fR, \fBinterim\fR or \fBnone\fR.
2001 The \fIddns-update-style\fR statement is only meaningful in the outer
2002 scope - it is evaluated once after reading the dhcpd.conf file, rather
2003 than each time a client is assigned an IP address, so there is no way
2004 to use different DNS update styles for different clients. The default
2005 is \fBnone\fR.
2006 .RE
2007 .PP
2008 .B The
2009 .I ddns-updates
2010 .B statement
2011 .RS 0.25i
2012 .PP
2013 \fBddns-updates \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
2014 .PP
2015 The \fIddns-updates\fR parameter controls whether or not the server will
2016 attempt to do a DNS update when a lease is confirmed. Set this to \fIoff\fR
2017 if the server should not attempt to do updates within a certain scope.
2018 The \fIddns-updates\fR parameter is on by default. To disable DNS
2019 updates in all scopes, it is preferable to use the
2020 \fIddns-update-style\fR statement, setting the style to \fInone\fR.
2021 .RE
2022 .PP
2023 The
2024 .I default-lease-time
2025 statement
2026 .RS 0.25i
2027 .PP
2028 .B default-lease-time \fItime\fR\fB;\fR
2029 .PP
2030 .I Time
2031 should be the length in seconds that will be assigned to a lease if
2032 the client requesting the lease does not ask for a specific expiration
2033 time. This is used for both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 leases (it is also known
2034 as the "valid lifetime" in DHCPv6).
2035 The default is 43200 seconds.
2036 .RE
2037 .PP
2038 The
2039 .I delayed-ack
2040 and
2041 .I max-ack-delay
2042 statements
2043 .RS 0.25i
2044 .PP
2045 .B delayed-ack \fIcount\fR\fB;\fR
2046 .B max-ack-delay \fImicroseconds\fR\fB;\fR
2047 .PP
2048 .I Count
2049 should be an integer value from zero to 2^16-1, and defaults to 28. The
2050 count represents how many DHCPv4 replies maximum will be queued pending
2051 transmission until after a database commit event. If this number is
2052 reached, a database commit event (commonly resulting in fsync() and
2053 representing a performance penalty) will be made, and the reply packets
2054 will be transmitted in a batch afterwards. This preserves the RFC2131
2055 direction that "stable storage" be updated prior to replying to clients.
2056 Should the DHCPv4 sockets "go dry" (select() returns immediately with no
2057 read sockets), the commit is made and any queued packets are transmitted.
2058 .PP
2059 Similarly, \fImicroseconds\fR indicates how many microseconds are permitted
2060 to pass inbetween queuing a packet pending an fsync, and performing the
2061 fsync. Valid values range from 0 to 2^32-1, and defaults to 250,000 (1/4 of
2062 a second).
2063 .PP
2064 Please note that as delayed-ack is currently experimental, the delayed-ack
2065 feature is not compiled in by default, but must be enabled at compile time
2066 with \'./configure --enable-delayed-ack\'.
2067 .RE
2068 .PP
2069 The
2070 .I dhcp-cache-threshold
2071 statement
2072 .RS 0.25i
2073 .PP
2074 .B dhcp-cache-threshold \fIpercentage\fB;\fR
2075 .PP
2076 The \fIdhcp-cache-threshold\fR statement takes one integer parameter
2077 with allowed values between 0 and 100. The default value is 25 (25% of
2078 the lease time). This parameter expresses the percentage of the total
2079 lease time, measured from the beginning, during which a
2080 client's attempt to renew its lease will result in getting
2081 the already assigned lease, rather than an extended lease.
2082 .PP
2083 Clients that attempt renewal frequently can cause the server to
2084 update and write the database frequently resulting in a performance
2085 impact on the server. The \fIdhcp-cache-threshold\fR
2086 statement instructs the DHCP server to avoid updating leases too
2087 frequently thus avoiding this behavior. Instead the server assigns the
2088 same lease with no modifications except for CLTT (Client Last
2089 Transmission Time) which does not require disk operations. This
2090 feature applies to IPv4 only.
2091 .RE
2092 .PP
2093 The
2094 .I do-forward-updates
2095 statement
2096 .RS 0.25i
2097 .PP
2098 .B do-forward-updates \fIflag\fB;\fR
2099 .PP
2100 The \fIdo-forward-updates\fR statement instructs the DHCP server as
2101 to whether it should attempt to update a DHCP client\'s A record
2102 when the client acquires or renews a lease. This statement has no
2103 effect unless DNS updates are enabled. Forward updates are enabled
2104 by default. If this statement is used to disable forward updates,
2105 the DHCP server will never attempt to update the client\'s A record,
2106 and will only ever attempt to update the client\'s PTR record if the
2107 client supplies an FQDN that should be placed in the PTR record using
2108 the \fBfqdn\fR option. If forward updates are enabled, the DHCP server
2109 will still honor the setting of the \fBclient-updates\fR flag.
2110 .RE
2111 .PP
2112 The
2113 .I dont-use-async
2114 statement
2115 .RS 0.25i
2116 .PP
2117 .B dont-use-async \fIflag\fB;\fR
2118 .PP
2119 The \fIdont-use-async\fR statement instructs the DHCP server if
2120 it should call fsync() when writing leases to the lease file. By
2121 default and if the flag is set to false the server \fBwill\fR call
2122 fsync(). Suppressing the call to fsync() may increase the performance
2123 of the server but it also adds a risk that a lease will not be
2124 properly written to the disk after it has been issued to a client
2125 and before the server stops. This can lead to duplicate leases
2126 being issued to different clients. Using this option is \fBnot
2127 recommended\FR.
2128 .RE
2129 .PP
2130 The
2131 .I dynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff
2132 statement
2133 .RS 0.25i
2134 .PP
2135 .B dynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff \fIdate\fB;\fR
2136 .PP
2137 The \fIdynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff\fR statement sets the ending time
2138 for all leases assigned dynamically to BOOTP clients. Because BOOTP
2139 clients do not have any way of renewing leases, and don't know that
2140 their leases could expire, by default dhcpd assigns infinite leases
2141 to all BOOTP clients. However, it may make sense in some situations
2142 to set a cutoff date for all BOOTP leases - for example, the end of a
2143 school term, or the time at night when a facility is closed and all
2144 machines are required to be powered off.
2145 .PP
2146 .I Date
2147 should be the date on which all assigned BOOTP leases will end. The
2148 date is specified in the form:
2149 .PP
2150 .ce 1
2151 W YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS
2152 .PP
2153 W is the day of the week expressed as a number
2154 from zero (Sunday) to six (Saturday). YYYY is the year, including the
2155 century. MM is the month expressed as a number from 1 to 12. DD is
2156 the day of the month, counting from 1. HH is the hour, from zero to
2157 23. MM is the minute and SS is the second. The time is always in
2158 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), not local time.
2159 .RE
2160 .PP
2161 The
2162 .I dynamic-bootp-lease-length
2163 statement
2164 .RS 0.25i
2165 .PP
2166 .B dynamic-bootp-lease-length\fR \fIlength\fR\fB;\fR
2167 .PP
2168 The \fIdynamic-bootp-lease-length\fR statement is used to set the
2169 length of leases dynamically assigned to BOOTP clients. At some
2170 sites, it may be possible to assume that a lease is no longer in
2171 use if its holder has not used BOOTP or DHCP to get its address within
2172 a certain time period. The period is specified in \fIlength\fR as a
2173 number of seconds. If a client reboots using BOOTP during the
2174 timeout period, the lease duration is reset to \fIlength\fR, so a
2175 BOOTP client that boots frequently enough will never lose its lease.
2176 Needless to say, this parameter should be adjusted with extreme
2177 caution.
2178 .RE
2179 .PP
2180 The
2181 .I filename
2182 statement
2183 .RS 0.25i
2184 .PP
2185 .B filename\fR \fB"\fR\fIfilename\fR\fB";\fR
2186 .PP
2187 The \fIfilename\fR statement can be used to specify the name of the
2188 initial boot file which is to be loaded by a client. The
2189 .I filename
2190 should be a filename recognizable to whatever file transfer protocol
2191 the client can be expected to use to load the file.
2192 .RE
2193 .PP
2194 The
2195 .I fixed-address
2196 declaration
2197 .RS 0.25i
2198 .PP
2199 .B fixed-address address\fR [\fB,\fR \fIaddress\fR ... ]\fB;\fR
2200 .PP
2201 The \fIfixed-address\fR declaration is used to assign one or more fixed
2202 IP addresses to a client. It should only appear in a \fIhost\fR
2203 declaration. If more than one address is supplied, then when the
2204 client boots, it will be assigned the address that corresponds to the
2205 network on which it is booting. If none of the addresses in the
2206 \fIfixed-address\fR statement are valid for the network to which the client
2207 is connected, that client will not match the \fIhost\fR declaration
2208 containing that \fIfixed-address\fR declaration. Each \fIaddress\fR
2209 in the \fIfixed-address\fR declaration should be either an IP address or
2210 a domain name that resolves to one or more IP addresses.
2211 .RE
2212 .PP
2213 The
2214 .I fixed-address6
2215 declaration
2216 .RS 0.25i
2217 .PP
2218 .B fixed-address6 ip6-address\fR ;\fR
2219 .PP
2220 The \fIfixed-address6\fR declaration is used to assign a fixed
2221 IPv6 addresses to a client. It should only appear in a \fIhost\fR
2222 declaration.
2223 .RE
2224 .PP
2225 The
2226 .I get-lease-hostnames
2227 statement
2228 .RS 0.25i
2229 .PP
2230 .B get-lease-hostnames\fR \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
2231 .PP
2232 The \fIget-lease-hostnames\fR statement is used to tell dhcpd whether
2233 or not to look up the domain name corresponding to the IP address of
2234 each address in the lease pool and use that address for the DHCP
2235 \fIhostname\fR option. If \fIflag\fR is true, then this lookup is
2236 done for all addresses in the current scope. By default, or if
2237 \fIflag\fR is false, no lookups are done.
2238 .RE
2239 .PP
2240 The
2241 .I hardware
2242 statement
2243 .RS 0.25i
2244 .PP
2245 .B hardware \fIhardware-type hardware-address\fB;\fR
2246 .PP
2247 In order for a BOOTP client to be recognized, its network hardware
2248 address must be declared using a \fIhardware\fR clause in the
2249 .I host
2250 statement.
2251 .I hardware-type
2252 must be the name of a physical hardware interface type. Currently,
2253 only the
2254 .B ethernet
2255 and
2256 .B token-ring
2257 types are recognized, although support for a
2258 .B fddi
2259 hardware type (and others) would also be desirable.
2260 The
2261 .I hardware-address
2262 should be a set of hexadecimal octets (numbers from 0 through ff)
2263 separated by colons. The \fIhardware\fR statement may also be used
2264 for DHCP clients.
2265 .RE
2266 .PP
2267 The
2268 .I host-identifier option
2269 statement
2270 .RS 0.25i
2271 .PP
2272 .B host-identifier option \fIoption-name option-data\fB;\fR
2273 .PP
2274 or
2275 .PP
2276 .B host-identifier v6relopt \fInumber option-name option-data\fB;\fR
2277 .PP
2278 This identifies a DHCPv6 client in a
2279 .I host
2280 statement.
2281 .I option-name
2282 is any option, and
2283 .I option-data
2284 is the value for the option that the client will send. The
2285 .I option-data
2286 must be a constant value. In the v6relopts case the additional number
2287 is the relay to examine for the specified option name and value. The
2288 values are the same as for the v6relay option. 0 is a no-op, 1 is the
2289 relay closest to the client, 2 the next one in and so on. Values that
2290 are larger than the maximum number of relays (currently 32) indicate the
2291 relay closest to the server independent of number.
2292 .RE
2293 .PP
2294 The
2295 .I infinite-is-reserved
2296 statement
2297 .RS 0.25i
2298 .PP
2299 .B infinite-is-reserved \fIflag\fB;\fR
2300 .PP
2301 ISC DHCP now supports \'reserved\' leases. See the section on RESERVED LEASES
2302 below. If this \fIflag\fR is on, the server will automatically reserve leases
2303 allocated to clients which requested an infinite (0xffffffff) lease-time.
2304 .PP
2305 The default is off.
2306 .RE
2307 .PP
2308 The
2309 .I lease-file-name
2310 statement
2311 .RS 0.25i
2312 .PP
2313 .B lease-file-name \fIname\fB;\fR
2314 .PP
2315 .I Name
2316 should be the name of the DHCP server's lease file. By default, this
2317 is DBDIR/dhcpd.leases. This statement \fBmust\fR appear in the outer
2318 scope of the configuration file - if it appears in some other scope,
2319 it will have no effect. Furthermore, it has no effect if overridden
2320 by the
2321 .B -lf
2322 flag or the
2323 .B PATH_DHCPD_DB
2324 environment variable.
2325 .RE
2326 .PP
2327 The
2328 .I limit-addrs-per-ia
2329 statement
2330 .RS 0.25i
2331 .PP
2332 .B limit-addrs-per-ia \fInumber\fB;\fR
2333 .PP
2334 By default, the DHCPv6 server will limit clients to one IAADDR per IA
2335 option, meaning one address. If you wish to permit clients to hang onto
2336 multiple addresses at a time, configure a larger \fInumber\fR here.
2337 .PP
2338 Note that there is no present method to configure the server to forcibly
2339 configure the client with one IP address per each subnet on a shared network.
2340 This is left to future work.
2341 .RE
2342 .PP
2343 The
2344 .I dhcpv6-lease-file-name
2345 statement
2346 .RS 0.25i
2347 .PP
2348 .B dhcpv6-lease-file-name \fIname\fB;\fR
2349 .PP
2350 .I Name
2351 is the name of the lease file to use if and only if the server is running
2352 in DHCPv6 mode. By default, this is DBDIR/dhcpd6.leases. This statement,
2353 like
2354 .I lease-file-name,
2355 \fBmust\fR appear in the outer scope of the configuration file. It
2356 has no effect if overridden by the
2357 .B -lf
2358 flag or the
2359 .B PATH_DHCPD6_DB
2360 environment variable. If
2361 .I dhcpv6-lease-file-name
2362 is not specified, but
2363 .I lease-file-name
2364 is, the latter value will be used.
2365 .RE
2366 .PP
2367 The
2368 .I local-port
2369 statement
2370 .RS 0.25i
2371 .PP
2372 .B local-port \fIport\fB;\fR
2373 .PP
2374 This statement causes the DHCP server to listen for DHCP requests on
2375 the UDP port specified in \fIport\fR, rather than on port 67.
2376 .RE
2377 .PP
2378 The
2379 .I local-address
2380 statement
2381 .RS 0.25i
2382 .PP
2383 .B local-address \fIaddress\fB;\fR
2384 .PP
2385 This statement causes the DHCP server to listen for DHCP requests sent
2386 to the specified \fIaddress\fR, rather than requests sent to all addresses.
2387 Since serving directly attached DHCP clients implies that the server must
2388 respond to requests sent to the all-ones IP address, this option cannot be
2389 used if clients are on directly attached networks; it is only realistically
2390 useful for a server whose only clients are reached via unicasts, such as via
2391 DHCP relay agents.
2392 .PP
2393 Note: This statement is only effective if the server was compiled using
2394 the USE_SOCKETS #define statement, which is default on a small number of
2395 operating systems, and must be explicitly chosen at compile-time for all
2396 others. You can be sure if your server is compiled with USE_SOCKETS if
2397 you see lines of this format at startup:
2398 .PP
2399 Listening on Socket/eth0
2400 .PP
2401 Note also that since this bind()s all DHCP sockets to the specified
2402 address, that only one address may be supported in a daemon at a given
2403 time.
2404 .RE
2405 .PP
2406 The
2407 .I log-facility
2408 statement
2409 .RS 0.25i
2410 .PP
2411 .B log-facility \fIfacility\fB;\fR
2412 .PP
2413 This statement causes the DHCP server to do all of its logging on the
2414 specified log facility once the dhcpd.conf file has been read. By
2415 default the DHCP server logs to the daemon facility. Possible log
2416 facilities include auth, authpriv, cron, daemon, ftp, kern, lpr, mail,
2417 mark, news, ntp, security, syslog, user, uucp, and local0 through
2418 local7. Not all of these facilities are available on all systems,
2419 and there may be other facilities available on other systems.
2420 .PP
2421 In addition to setting this value, you may need to modify your
2422 .I syslog.conf
2423 file to configure logging of the DHCP server. For example, you might
2424 add a line like this:
2425 .PP
2426 .nf
2427 local7.debug /var/log/dhcpd.log
2428 .fi
2429 .PP
2430 The syntax of the \fIsyslog.conf\fR file may be different on some
2431 operating systems - consult the \fIsyslog.conf\fR manual page to be
2432 sure. To get syslog to start logging to the new file, you must first
2433 create the file with correct ownership and permissions (usually, the
2434 same owner and permissions of your /var/log/messages or
2435 /usr/adm/messages file should be fine) and send a SIGHUP to syslogd.
2436 Some systems support log rollover using a shell script or program
2437 called newsyslog or logrotate, and you may be able to configure this
2438 as well so that your log file doesn't grow uncontrollably.
2439 .PP
2440 Because the \fIlog-facility\fR setting is controlled by the dhcpd.conf
2441 file, log messages printed while parsing the dhcpd.conf file or before
2442 parsing it are logged to the default log facility. To prevent this,
2443 see the README file included with this distribution, which describes
2444 BUG: where is that mentioned in README?
2445 how to change the default log facility. When this parameter is used,
2446 the DHCP server prints its startup message a second time after parsing
2447 the configuration file, so that the log will be as complete as
2448 possible.
2449 .RE
2450 .PP
2451 The
2452 .I max-lease-time
2453 statement
2454 .RS 0.25i
2455 .PP
2456 .B max-lease-time \fItime\fR\fB;\fR
2457 .PP
2458 .I Time
2459 should be the maximum length in seconds that will be assigned to a
2460 lease.
2461 If not defined, the default maximum lease time is 86400.
2462 The only exception to this is that Dynamic BOOTP lease
2463 lengths, which are not specified by the client, are not limited by
2464 this maximum.
2465 .RE
2466 .PP
2467 The
2468 .I min-lease-time
2469 statement
2470 .RS 0.25i
2471 .PP
2472 .B min-lease-time \fItime\fR\fB;\fR
2473 .PP
2474 .I Time
2475 should be the minimum length in seconds that will be assigned to a
2476 lease.
2477 The default is the minimum of 300 seconds or
2478 \fBmax-lease-time\fR.
2479 .RE
2480 .PP
2481 The
2482 .I min-secs
2483 statement
2484 .RS 0.25i
2485 .PP
2486 .B min-secs \fIseconds\fR\fB;\fR
2487 .PP
2488 .I Seconds
2489 should be the minimum number of seconds since a client began trying to
2490 acquire a new lease before the DHCP server will respond to its request.
2491 The number of seconds is based on what the client reports, and the maximum
2492 value that the client can report is 255 seconds. Generally, setting this
2493 to one will result in the DHCP server not responding to the client's first
2494 request, but always responding to its second request.
2495 .PP
2496 This can be used
2497 to set up a secondary DHCP server which never offers an address to a client
2498 until the primary server has been given a chance to do so. If the primary
2499 server is down, the client will bind to the secondary server, but otherwise
2500 clients should always bind to the primary. Note that this does not, by
2501 itself, permit a primary server and a secondary server to share a pool of
2502 dynamically-allocatable addresses.
2503 .RE
2504 .PP
2505 The
2506 .I next-server
2507 statement
2508 .RS 0.25i
2509 .PP
2510 .B next-server\fR \fIserver-name\fR\fB;\fR
2511 .PP
2512 The \fInext-server\fR statement is used to specify the host address of
2513 the server from which the initial boot file (specified in the
2514 \fIfilename\fR statement) is to be loaded. \fIServer-name\fR should
2515 be a numeric IP address or a domain name.
2516 .RE
2517 .PP
2518 The
2519 .I omapi-port
2520 statement
2521 .RS 0.25i
2522 .PP
2523 .B omapi-port\fR \fIport\fR\fB;\fR
2524 .PP
2525 The \fIomapi-port\fR statement causes the DHCP server to listen for
2526 OMAPI connections on the specified port. This statement is required
2527 to enable the OMAPI protocol, which is used to examine and modify the
2528 state of the DHCP server as it is running.
2529 .RE
2530 .PP
2531 The
2532 .I one-lease-per-client
2533 statement
2534 .RS 0.25i
2535 .PP
2536 .B one-lease-per-client \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
2537 .PP
2538 If this flag is enabled, whenever a client sends a DHCPREQUEST for a
2539 particular lease, the server will automatically free any other leases
2540 the client holds. This presumes that when the client sends a
2541 DHCPREQUEST, it has forgotten any lease not mentioned in the
2542 DHCPREQUEST - i.e., the client has only a single network interface
2543 .I and
2544 it does not remember leases it's holding on networks to which it is
2545 not currently attached. Neither of these assumptions are guaranteed
2546 or provable, so we urge caution in the use of this statement.
2547 .RE
2548 .PP
2549 The
2550 .I pid-file-name
2551 statement
2552 .RS 0.25i
2553 .PP
2554 .B pid-file-name
2555 .I name\fR\fB;\fR
2556 .PP
2557 .I Name
2558 should be the name of the DHCP server's process ID file. This is the
2559 file in which the DHCP server's process ID is stored when the server
2560 starts. By default, this is RUNDIR/dhcpd.pid. Like the
2561 .I lease-file-name
2562 statement, this statement must appear in the outer scope
2563 of the configuration file. It has no effect if overridden by the
2564 .B -pf
2565 flag or the
2566 .B PATH_DHCPD_PID
2567 environment variable.
2568 .PP
2569 The
2570 .I dhcpv6-pid-file-name
2571 statement
2572 .RS 0.25i
2573 .PP
2574 .B dhcpv6-pid-file-name \fIname\fB;\fR
2575 .PP
2576 .I Name
2577 is the name of the pid file to use if and only if the server is running
2578 in DHCPv6 mode. By default, this is DBDIR/dhcpd6.pid. This statement,
2579 like
2580 .I pid-file-name,
2581 \fBmust\fR appear in the outer scope of the configuration file. It
2582 has no effect if overridden by the
2583 .B -pf
2584 flag or the
2585 .B PATH_DHCPD6_PID
2586 environment variable. If
2587 .I dhcpv6-pid-file-name
2588 is not specified, but
2589 .I pid-file-name
2590 is, the latter value will be used.
2591 .RE
2592 .PP
2593 The
2594 .I ping-check
2595 statement
2596 .RS 0.25i
2597 .PP
2598 .B ping-check
2599 .I flag\fR\fB;\fR
2600 .PP
2601 When the DHCP server is considering dynamically allocating an IP
2602 address to a client, it first sends an ICMP Echo request (a \fIping\fR)
2603 to the address being assigned. It waits for a second, and if no
2604 ICMP Echo response has been heard, it assigns the address. If a
2605 response \fIis\fR heard, the lease is abandoned, and the server does
2606 not respond to the client.
2607 .PP
2608 This \fIping check\fR introduces a default one-second delay in responding
2609 to DHCPDISCOVER messages, which can be a problem for some clients. The
2610 default delay of one second may be configured using the ping-timeout
2611 parameter. The ping-check configuration parameter can be used to control
2612 checking - if its value is false, no ping check is done.
2613 .RE
2614 .PP
2615 The
2616 .I ping-timeout
2617 statement
2618 .RS 0.25i
2619 .PP
2620 .B ping-timeout
2621 .I seconds\fR\fB;\fR
2622 .PP
2623 If the DHCP server determined it should send an ICMP echo request (a
2624 \fIping\fR) because the ping-check statement is true, ping-timeout allows
2625 you to configure how many seconds the DHCP server should wait for an
2626 ICMP Echo response to be heard, if no ICMP Echo response has been received
2627 before the timeout expires, it assigns the address. If a response \fIis\fR
2628 heard, the lease is abandoned, and the server does not respond to the client.
2629 If no value is set, ping-timeout defaults to 1 second.
2630 .RE
2631 .PP
2632 The
2633 .I preferred-lifetime
2634 statement
2635 .RS 0.25i
2636 .PP
2637 .B preferred-lifetime
2638 .I seconds\fR\fB;\fR
2639 .PP
2640 IPv6 addresses have \'valid\' and \'preferred\' lifetimes. The valid lifetime
2641 determines at what point at lease might be said to have expired, and is no
2642 longer useable. A preferred lifetime is an advisory condition to help
2643 applications move off of the address and onto currently valid addresses
2644 (should there still be any open TCP sockets or similar).
2645 .PP
2646 The preferred lifetime defaults to the renew+rebind timers, or 3/4 the
2647 default lease time if none were specified.
2648 .RE
2649 .PP
2650 The
2651 .I remote-port
2652 statement
2653 .RS 0.25i
2654 .PP
2655 .B remote-port \fIport\fB;\fR
2656 .PP
2657 This statement causes the DHCP server to transmit DHCP responses to DHCP
2658 clients upon the UDP port specified in \fIport\fR, rather than on port 68.
2659 In the event that the UDP response is transmitted to a DHCP Relay, the
2660 server generally uses the \fBlocal-port\fR configuration value. Should the
2661 DHCP Relay happen to be addressed as 127.0.0.1, however, the DHCP Server
2662 transmits its response to the \fBremote-port\fR configuration value. This
2663 is generally only useful for testing purposes, and this configuration value
2664 should generally not be used.
2665 .RE
2666 .PP
2667 The
2668 .I server-identifier
2669 statement
2670 .RS 0.25i
2671 .PP
2672 .B server-identifier \fIhostname\fR\fB;\fR
2673 .PP
2674 The server-identifier statement can be used to define the value that
2675 is sent in the DHCP Server Identifier option for a given scope. The
2676 value specified \fBmust\fR be an IP address for the DHCP server, and
2677 must be reachable by all clients served by a particular scope.
2678 .PP
2679 The use of the server-identifier statement is not recommended - the only
2680 reason to use it is to force a value other than the default value to be
2681 sent on occasions where the default value would be incorrect. The default
2682 value is the first IP address associated with the physical network interface
2683 on which the request arrived.
2684 .PP
2685 The usual case where the
2686 \fIserver-identifier\fR statement needs to be sent is when a physical
2687 interface has more than one IP address, and the one being sent by default
2688 isn't appropriate for some or all clients served by that interface.
2689 Another common case is when an alias is defined for the purpose of
2690 having a consistent IP address for the DHCP server, and it is desired
2691 that the clients use this IP address when contacting the server.
2692 .PP
2693 Supplying a value for the dhcp-server-identifier option is equivalent
2694 to using the server-identifier statement.
2695 .RE
2696 .PP
2697 The
2698 .I server-duid
2699 statement
2700 .RS 0.25i
2701 .PP
2702 .B server-duid \fILLT\fR [ \fIhardware-type\fR \fItimestamp\fR \fIhardware-address\fR ] \fB;\fR
2703
2704 .B server-duid \fIEN\fR \fIenterprise-number\fR \fIenterprise-identifier\fR \fB;\fR
2705
2706 .B server-duid \fILL\fR [ \fIhardware-type\fR \fIhardware-address\fR ] \fB;\fR
2707 .PP
2708 The server-duid statement configures the server DUID. You may pick either
2709 LLT (link local address plus time), EN (enterprise), or LL (link local).
2710 .PP
2711 If you choose LLT or LL, you may specify the exact contents of the DUID.
2712 Otherwise the server will generate a DUID of the specified type.
2713 .PP
2714 If you choose EN, you must include the enterprise number and the
2715 enterprise-identifier.
2716 .PP
2717 The default server-duid type is LLT.
2718 .RE
2719 .PP
2720 The
2721 .I server-name
2722 statement
2723 .RS 0.25i
2724 .PP
2725 .B server-name "\fIname\fB";\fR
2726 .PP
2727 The \fIserver-name\fR statement can be used to inform the client of
2728 the name of the server from which it is booting. \fIName\fR should
2729 be the name that will be provided to the client.
2730 .RE
2731 .PP
2732 The
2733 .I site-option-space
2734 statement
2735 .RS 0.25i
2736 .PP
2737 .B site-option-space "\fIname\fB";\fR
2738 .PP
2739 The \fIsite-option-space\fR statement can be used to determine from
2740 what option space site-local options will be taken. This can be used
2741 in much the same way as the \fIvendor-option-space\fR statement.
2742 Site-local options in DHCP are those options whose numeric codes are
2743 greater than 224. These options are intended for site-specific
2744 uses, but are frequently used by vendors of embedded hardware that
2745 contains DHCP clients. Because site-specific options are allocated
2746 on an ad hoc basis, it is quite possible that one vendor's DHCP client
2747 might use the same option code that another vendor's client uses, for
2748 different purposes. The \fIsite-option-space\fR option can be used
2749 to assign a different set of site-specific options for each such
2750 vendor, using conditional evaluation (see \fBdhcp-eval (5)\fR for
2751 details).
2752 .RE
2753 .PP
2754 The
2755 .I stash-agent-options
2756 statement
2757 .RS 0.25i
2758 .PP
2759 .B stash-agent-options \fIflag\fB;\fR
2760 .PP
2761 If the \fIstash-agent-options\fR parameter is true for a given client,
2762 the server will record the relay agent information options sent during
2763 the client's initial DHCPREQUEST message when the client was in the
2764 SELECTING state and behave as if those options are included in all
2765 subsequent DHCPREQUEST messages sent in the RENEWING state. This
2766 works around a problem with relay agent information options, which is
2767 that they usually not appear in DHCPREQUEST messages sent by the
2768 client in the RENEWING state, because such messages are unicast
2769 directly to the server and not sent through a relay agent.
2770 .RE
2771 .PP
2772 The
2773 .I update-conflict-detection
2774 statement
2775 .RS 0.25i
2776 .PP
2777 .B update-conflict-detection \fIflag\fB;\fR
2778 .PP
2779 If the \fIupdate-conflict-detection\fR parameter is true, the server will
2780 perform standard DHCID multiple-client, one-name conflict detection. If
2781 the parameter has been set false, the server will skip this check and
2782 instead simply tear down any previous bindings to install the new
2783 binding without question. The default is true.
2784 .RE
2785 .PP
2786 The
2787 .I update-optimization
2788 statement
2789 .RS 0.25i
2790 .PP
2791 .B update-optimization \fIflag\fB;\fR
2792 .PP
2793 If the \fIupdate-optimization\fR parameter is false for a given client,
2794 the server will attempt a DNS update for that client each time the
2795 client renews its lease, rather than only attempting an update when it
2796 appears to be necessary. This will allow the DNS to heal from
2797 database inconsistencies more easily, but the cost is that the DHCP
2798 server must do many more DNS updates. We recommend leaving this option
2799 enabled, which is the default. This option only affects the behavior of
2800 the interim DNS update scheme, and has no effect on the ad-hoc DNS update
2801 scheme. If this parameter is not specified, or is true, the DHCP server
2802 will only update when the client information changes, the client gets a
2803 different lease, or the client's lease expires.
2804 .RE
2805 .PP
2806 The
2807 .I update-static-leases
2808 statement
2809 .RS 0.25i
2810 .PP
2811 .B update-static-leases \fIflag\fB;\fR
2812 .PP
2813 The \fIupdate-static-leases\fR flag, if enabled, causes the DHCP
2814 server to do DNS updates for clients even if those clients are being
2815 assigned their IP address using a \fIfixed-address\fR statement - that
2816 is, the client is being given a static assignment. This can only
2817 work with the \fIinterim\fR DNS update scheme. It is not
2818 recommended because the DHCP server has no way to tell that the update
2819 has been done, and therefore will not delete the record when it is not
2820 in use. Also, the server must attempt the update each time the
2821 client renews its lease, which could have a significant performance
2822 impact in environments that place heavy demands on the DHCP server.
2823 .RE
2824 .PP
2825 The
2826 .I use-host-decl-names
2827 statement
2828 .RS 0.25i
2829 .PP
2830 .B use-host-decl-names \fIflag\fB;\fR
2831 .PP
2832 If the \fIuse-host-decl-names\fR parameter is true in a given scope,
2833 then for every host declaration within that scope, the name provided
2834 for the host declaration will be supplied to the client as its
2835 hostname. So, for example,
2836 .PP
2837 .nf
2838 group {
2839 use-host-decl-names on;
2840
2841 host joe {
2842 hardware ethernet 08:00:2b:4c:29:32;
2843 fixed-address joe.fugue.com;
2844 }
2845 }
2846
2847 is equivalent to
2848
2849 host joe {
2850 hardware ethernet 08:00:2b:4c:29:32;
2851 fixed-address joe.fugue.com;
2852 option host-name "joe";
2853 }
2854 .fi
2855 .PP
2856 An \fIoption host-name\fR statement within a host declaration will
2857 override the use of the name in the host declaration.
2858 .PP
2859 It should be noted here that most DHCP clients completely ignore the
2860 host-name option sent by the DHCP server, and there is no way to
2861 configure them not to do this. So you generally have a choice of
2862 either not having any hostname to client IP address mapping that the
2863 client will recognize, or doing DNS updates. It is beyond
2864 the scope of this document to describe how to make this
2865 determination.
2866 .RE
2867 .PP
2868 The
2869 .I use-lease-addr-for-default-route
2870 statement
2871 .RS 0.25i
2872 .PP
2873 .B use-lease-addr-for-default-route \fIflag\fR\fB;\fR
2874 .PP
2875 If the \fIuse-lease-addr-for-default-route\fR parameter is true in a
2876 given scope, then instead of sending the value specified in the
2877 routers option (or sending no value at all), the IP address of the
2878 lease being assigned is sent to the client. This supposedly causes
2879 Win95 machines to ARP for all IP addresses, which can be helpful if
2880 your router is configured for proxy ARP. The use of this feature is
2881 not recommended, because it won't work for many DHCP clients.
2882 .RE
2883 .PP
2884 The
2885 .I vendor-option-space
2886 statement
2887 .RS 0.25i
2888 .PP
2889 .B vendor-option-space \fIstring\fR\fB;\fR
2890 .PP
2891 The \fIvendor-option-space\fR parameter determines from what option
2892 space vendor options are taken. The use of this configuration
2893 parameter is illustrated in the \fBdhcp-options(5)\fR manual page, in
2894 the \fIVENDOR ENCAPSULATED OPTIONS\fR section.
2895 .RE
2896 .SH SETTING PARAMETER VALUES USING EXPRESSIONS
2897 Sometimes it's helpful to be able to set the value of a DHCP server
2898 parameter based on some value that the client has sent. To do this,
2899 you can use expression evaluation. The
2900 .B dhcp-eval(5)
2901 manual page describes how to write expressions. To assign the result
2902 of an evaluation to an option, define the option as follows:
2903 .nf
2904 .sp 1
2905 \fImy-parameter \fB= \fIexpression \fB;\fR
2906 .fi
2907 .PP
2908 For example:
2909 .nf
2910 .sp 1
2911 ddns-hostname = binary-to-ascii (16, 8, "-",
2912 substring (hardware, 1, 6));
2913 .fi
2914 .RE
2915 .SH RESERVED LEASES
2916 It's often useful to allocate a single address to a single client, in
2917 approximate perpetuity. Host statements with \fBfixed-address\fR clauses
2918 exist to a certain extent to serve this purpose, but because host statements
2919 are intended to approximate \'static configuration\', they suffer from not
2920 being referenced in a littany of other Server Services, such as dynamic DNS,
2921 failover, \'on events\' and so forth.
2922 .PP
2923 If a standard dynamic lease, as from any range statement, is marked
2924 \'reserved\', then the server will only allocate this lease to the client it
2925 is identified by (be that by client identifier or hardware address).
2926 .PP
2927 In practice, this means that the lease follows the normal state engine, enters
2928 ACTIVE state when the client is bound to it, expires, or is released, and any
2929 events or services that would normally be supplied during these events are
2930 processed normally, as with any other dynamic lease. The only difference
2931 is that failover servers treat reserved leases as special when they enter
2932 the FREE or BACKUP states - each server applies the lease into the state it
2933 may allocate from - and the leases are not placed on the queue for allocation
2934 to other clients. Instead they may only be \'found\' by client identity. The
2935 result is that the lease is only offered to the returning client.
2936 .PP
2937 Care should probably be taken to ensure that the client only has one lease
2938 within a given subnet that it is identified by.
2939 .PP
2940 Leases may be set \'reserved\' either through OMAPI, or through the
2941 \'infinite-is-reserved\' configuration option (if this is applicable to your
2942 environment and mixture of clients).
2943 .PP
2944 It should also be noted that leases marked \'reserved\' are effectively treated
2945 the same as leases marked \'bootp\'.
2946 .RE
2947 .SH REFERENCE: OPTION STATEMENTS
2948 DHCP option statements are documented in the
2949 .B dhcp-options(5)
2950 manual page.
2951 .SH REFERENCE: EXPRESSIONS
2952 Expressions used in DHCP option statements and elsewhere are
2953 documented in the
2954 .B dhcp-eval(5)
2955 manual page.
2956 .SH SEE ALSO
2957 dhcpd(8), dhcpd.leases(5), dhcp-options(5), dhcp-eval(5), RFC2132, RFC2131.
2958 .SH AUTHOR
2959 .B dhcpd.conf(5)
2960 was written by Ted Lemon
2961 under a contract with Vixie Labs. Funding
2962 for this project was provided by Internet Systems Consortium.
2963 Information about Internet Systems Consortium can be found at
2964 .B https://www.isc.org.