Multi-server pool question.

Phill Harvey-Smith phill-list at bio.warwick.ac.uk
Fri Feb 13 12:19:24 UTC 2009


Hi there,

We run three DHCP servers on our departmental Linux machines which hand 
out addresses for some 500+ machines, laptops and printers.

Up until now we have statically assigned IP addresses to MAC addresses 
in the dhcp.conf file. This has the advantage that no un-registered host 
will get an IP addresss, which helps to prevent un-authorised computers 
being used on our network.

However recently we have been running short of IP addresses so would 
like to move over to pool asigned IPs for the laptop machines, as it is 
unlikley that these will all be connected at once, we intend to leave 
the printers and desktop machines statically assigned.

I have worked out how to do this, and have this working in a test 
environment, however, I can see that having a pool of addresses assigned 
by multiple servers could cause problems with one server assigning an 
address to one machine and another server assigning the same address to 
a different machine.

Is there a way that I can resolve this issue, bu configuring the servers 
to share pool information, or will I have to reserve allocation of the 
pool addresses to only one of the servers but let the others also manage 
the statically assigned ones.

As the dhcp.conf files are built from a MySQL database using in-house 
writen php code, whatever solution is best should be prety easy to 
implement.

Cheers.

Phill.



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