DHCP forwarding and multiple subnets on a single interface.

[Frances Albemuth]

On 8/17/06, Simon Hobson <dhcp1 at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> Frances Albemuth wrote:
>
> >  First post to the list, so apologies in advance if my etiquette
> >isn't appropriate.  I'm using the ISC DHCP server in a rather vanilla
> >configuration right now and I'm moving towards the addition of new
> >interfaces over which DHCP will be served via forwarding.  I would
> >like to be able to map multiple address blocks to a single interface
> >and have the DHCP server make offers based on utilization of pools,
> >but I see no way to do this.  It seems to me that the server sees the
> >source address of the interface from which the request was forwarded
> >in therefore makes an offer from that pool (subnet a.b.c.d).
>
> >It's not
> >obvious looking at the man file (and frankly seems counter-intuitive)
> >that you can specify a range or pool inside of a subnet declaration
> >that lives outside of said subnet.  Has anybody got a way of
> >accomplishing this?
>
> I believe what you are describing is a Shared Network - more than one
> IP subnet on the same physical network.
>
> The syntax is basically :
>
> shared-network "officenet" {
>    subnet ...
>    }
>    subnet ...
>    }
> }
>
> You can have multiple shared network declarations if you have
> multiple shared networks.
>
> This tells DHCP server that when it receives a request tagged with an
> IP in ANY of the subnets in the shared network, then it can give out
> ANY IP in any of the subnets that it is configured to give out. What
> it won't do is any form of 'load balancing' or client affinity
> without some help.
>
> What you will find is that if you just start up a fresh config with
> (say) two large pools, the server will allocate from one pool until
> all it's addresses have been used once, and only them start
> allocating from the second pool. You have two main ways of changing
> this behaviour :
>
> 1) use classes (or host statements & fixed addresses) to associate
> classes to a particular pool. For example, if you had IP phones then
> you might assign all IP phones to one pool (using perhaps the first
> three byte of the mac address to identify them) and everything else
> to another pool.
>
> 2) Artificially restrict one pool to force allocation from the other.
> By restricting the size of the pool used first, the server will be
> forced to allocated from the other pool - once a client has an
> allocation, then in general it will continue to use that in future.
> By expanding the pools as the number of clients increases you can get
> to a situation where the distribution appears to have some randomness.
>
> There is a third way that comes to mind, create dummy expired leases
> for all addresses (either by adding them to the leases file or using
> omshell). If you do this alternatively from each pool (ie when sorted
> chronologically they go A B A B A B A B ... where A and B are the two
> pools) then the server will reuse addresses and it's least recently
> used algorithm will make it use address alternately from each pool.
>
> Of course, once all addresses have been used at least once by real
> clients, then future assignments will appear to be random because of
> the least recently used criteria for selecting an address to
> reallocate.
>
> Simon
>
>