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Administration Tools for DHCP

by Herman Verkade

The basic configuration tool for DHCP on Linux is called "an editor". Any editor will do. All configuration information is stored in the dhcpd.conf file. As I have mentioned in various other places, I often prefer editing text files over GUIs. GUIs don't allow cut-and-paste. GUIs require you to switch continually between keyboard and mouse. GUIs often do more than you want them to do (especially 'Wizards'). On the other hand, a simple text-based configuration file can be edited with any text editor, and you have full control over what goes into the configuration file.

But I am also aware that not everybody agrees with me on that. For those that don't, there are quite a few administration tools for DHCP. For example:

• Webmin - An all-purpose, all singing and dancing suite of web-based administration tools for many different flavours of Unix, which includes a module to configure the ISC DHCP Server.
• config-dhcpd - A graphical DHCP daemon configuration tool, written in Python by Richard June.
• Dixie - A web-based DHCP and DNS configuration tool written in PHP by Tomica Crnek.

Some other tools that may be useful to manage a DHCP environment:

• check_dhcpd - Generates DHCP statistics, which can be emailed to the administrators on a regular basis. Written in Perl by Eugene Wong.
• CSUMB's DHCP Stats - Another statistics tool, designed to produce output for a website.
• DHCP-Locator - Tool to trace DHCP leases down to ports in switches and MAC addresses.

I have not tried any of the above tools, so your mileage may vary. There are also plenty other tools available on the net, many of which can be found on SourceForge and/or FreshMeat.