DHCP Leases Parser

Wed Apr 13 15:58:29 UTC 2016

ISC Kea stores your leases in a DB if you want it to, and the devs announced some time ago that they will be adding support to store subnet declarations as well as the subnet options in the DB as well, IIRC.

I am waiting for these features before I proceed with my own project, currently using the working title FOSDDI.

I won't bore you with the details, but it may be somewhat like what you are looking for.

The project is still in its infancy and has been put on a bit of a hiatus until the Kea DB backend stuff is made available.  But I believe it would be a boon to many people facing similar issues of making sense of the DHCP leases file.

I am also looking for collaborators so if any of this sounds remotely interesting feel free to look the project up on github or contact me off-list.

Jake Sallee
Godfather of Bandwidth
System Engineer
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
WWW.UMHB.EDU

900 College St.
Belton, Texas
76513

Fone: 254-295-4658
Phax: 254-295-4221
________________________________
From: dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org <dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org> on behalf of Ryan Gray <ryantgray at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 10:23 AM
To: Users of ISC DHCP
Subject: Re: DHCP Leases Parser

Jose,

That should have been my third part in the original email - is this recreating the proverbial wheel? Am I just uninformed about some existing solution? I've looked at storing leases in mysql in the past and the only direction I saw was via Kea. At the time, Kea did not support many of the things I needed out of DHCP. I have some pretty specific Option 82 requirements in my configuration and I just couldn't see how to get that done with Kea. At the same time, I did not see a good way to store the leases in mysql. A sub-target with the PHP classes I've been writing is to make objects out of each lease and store it in mysql on the back-end for persistence.  Am I missing a piece here?

Regards,
Ryan Gray

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 10:16 AM, José Queiroz <zekkerj at gmail.com<mailto:zekkerj at gmail.com>> wrote:
I believe that what you're trying to do is partly implemented with storing leases on MySQL databases.

2016-04-13 12:11 GMT-03:00 Ryan Gray <ryantgray at gmail.com<mailto:ryantgray at gmail.com>>:
Thanks for your input Patrick.  I'll look into what might be helpful information from the ISC folks. I am going to put some time in up front on something that might help obfuscate leases data while keeping same-data-points randomized to the same strings (if that makes sense). As much as I would like to skip this step for the sake of diving into the development of the parser itself, I cannot make a case for sending this data out without this step or some mitigating actions to remove the risk.

Thank you.

Regards,
Ryan Gray

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:48 AM, Patrick Trapp <ptrapp at nex-tech.com<mailto:ptrapp at nex-tech.com>> wrote:
It would be interesting to see if the ISC folks can provide some insight/aid to you even if they as an organization have not prioritized building the project themselves.

We have a pretty simplistic analysis that I might be able to share with you, but I think your PHP classes are probably what our developers are using.

I have a pretty busy leases file, I think, but I would want to obfuscate things before I gave it to "some dude on the Internet" as you so eloquently put it.

Patrick

________________________________
From: dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org<mailto:dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org> [dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org<mailto:dhcp-users-bounces at lists.isc.org>] on behalf of Ryan Gray [ryantgray at gmail.com<mailto:ryantgray at gmail.com>]
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 9:36 AM
To: Users of ISC DHCP
Subject: DHCP Leases Parser

Greetings everyone,

This is one part poll, one part request. I am working on a project that necessitates analyzing the dhcpd.leases "database".  For many years I have struggled with getting usable information out of the leases database in a sane fashion.  While there have been some very helpful utilities, (command line scripts, dhcpstatus.cgi, dhcpd-pools anyone?), none of them have been exactly what I was looking for and all of them are quite antiquated in regards to what they are built with.  I've had it with cobbling together nearly unacceptable solutions and am going to build an application to solve this, at the very least for myself. I've got a good start with some super helpful PHP classes that I've been working on.

Poll:
If there were a service that allowed you to upload, or otherwise sync, your leases file and would give you status, statistics, and historical information, would you be interested in using it? I am not talking about anything that is actively part of the DHCP traffic, purely a leases analyzer.  Is there interest in a web based utility like this?

Request:
If there is interest in a service like this, it will be imperative that I gather as many example dhcpd.leases files as possible during development. I can only generate so much data locally and I want to account for as many variables as possible. My request is that if you are interested in something like this and are able to send me any dhcpd.leases files, that would be extremely helpful. I realize that leases information might be considered too sensitive to just send to some dude on the internet, so if anyone is interested and finds this a hurdle, I would be happy to come up with a way for us to mitigate that risk.  ....perhaps a script that you can run locally to obscure sensitive data.

Just putting out the feelers here. This is getting built regardless, but if there is community interest in the topic, I would be excited to work with you and to give back to a community that has done so much for so many for so long.

Regards,
Ryan Gray

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