ISC DHCPd can be used to serve IP addresses to a small home network and for that, the following template packs some of the essentials and can be used as a starting template. The template provided here has a modular design where features can be turned off by commenting out included files. The intended audience consists of small businesses or homeowners that need a minimal and compatible network.

Most of these features can be disabled by commenting out the responsible file.

• Dynamic DNS updates if ISC BIND is available.
• i/PXE boot.
• Configured and enabled BOOTP for legacy clients.
• Apple Intel NetBoot possible.
• Separate pass-through class for allowing clients to be placed in separate pools.
• Purpose-oriented static host declarations (ie: for equipment, virtual machines, etc…).

The template can be checked out using Subversion from the following repository:

• Home Networking DHCPd Template

Ensure that the ISC DHCPd server is installed. Under Debian, you would issue as root:

aptitude install isc-dhcpd

to install the DHCP server.

Change to the directory where your DHCPd configuration files are located (usually, in /etc/dhcp/) and issue:

svn export http://svn.grimore.org/configuration-templates/dhcpd/isc/home --force . 

to pull all the configuration files.

The ISC DHCPd template is pre-configured under the following assumptions:

• The template is configured to manage the class C network 192.168.0.0 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 - you will need to change the settings in dhcpd.conf and update the filenames of the files:

dhcpd-subnets/subnet-192.168.0.0.conf
dhcpd-subnets/ddns-subnet-192.168.0.0.conf

• DDNS is enabled and ISC BIND has to be setup for DDNS to work. If you do not need DDNS, then you can comment out the following line in the file dhcpd-subnets/subnet-192.168.0.0.conf:

### Dynamic DNS (DDNS)
include "/etc/dhcp/dhcpd-subnets/ddns-subnet-192.168.0.0.conf";

otherwise, the dhcpd-subnets/ddns-subnet-192.168.0.0.conf file has to be edited and configured.

• The forward zone TLD is configured to be home - please do not use local since it conflicts with mDNS.
• The key shared between ISC BIND and DHCPd is included from dhcpd.conf:

### The key that allows this DHCP server to update ISC BIND.
include "/etc/bind/rndc.key";