[Infrastructures] managing dhcpd.conf

[Sean Kelly]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 11:28:01AM -0700, David Masten wrote:
> Just wondering if anyone has done or knows of software that changes
> dhcpd.conf files in a programmatic fashion. 
> 
> dhcpd configs are the last thing I'm manually maintaining, and it is
> getting in the way of other things I've automated. 

Here at Creighton, a coworker and I designed a custom registration system
that manages DNS and DHCP while providing an SQL backend and performing
updates using dynamic updates. It is similar, but more featureful, than
Southwestern's NetReg software (http://www.netreg.org/). It is more on par
with OSUOSL's Maintain (http://osuosl.org/projects/maintain/).

> More specifically, I manage a lab environment with thousands of hosts
> and hundreds of users. As a lab environment, installing OS's is the task
> that I and my peers do most of. I've got the whole install process down
> to a few clicks and some text entries in some web pages, except for
> manually inserting 'host foo { hardware ...' in the dhcpd.conf. 

If you have installs working in an automated fashion using web pages, have
you looked into using DHCPD's OMAPI protocol to send updates to the DHCP
server? We don't do this yet, but the possibility is there.

I would be interested to hear more about your installation solution.

-- 
Sean M. Kelly
UNIX Systems Architect
Division of Information Technology
Creighton University
(402) 280-2264