DHCPStatus provides information about your DHCPD environment at two levels: an overall summary report, and a subnet detail report.
 

Summary report

Each row of the summary report contains information for a single subnet defined in the dhcpd.conf file.  The information described for each subnet is:

• the subnet address,
• netmask,
• the range of IP addresses that fall within the subnet,
• the router(s) for the subnet,
• the number of IP addresses that are defined in the dynamic pool for that subnet,
• the number of IP addresses in the dynamic pool that are in use, and
• the number of IP addresses in the dynamic pool that are free.

All this information is obtained from the dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files, in their standard formats. In addition, if you use an extra format standard for commenting each subnet in your dhcpd.conf file, this utility will find those comments and include them as a "Location" field in the summary report.

For each active address, the following is displayed:

the start date of the lease,

the end date of the lease,

the mac address of the interface that has the IP address lease,

the DNS name of the interface that has the lease (as supplied by the client), and

the hostname (or WINS name, assuming the client is using WINS) of the machine that has the lease.

Overall, these two reports provide a quick and easy way of summarising the status of your DHCPD server (a lot easier than scanning through the dhcpd.leases file manually :-)

If you want to use DHCPStatus, you'll firstly need read access to your dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files.  You'll also require Perl 5.003 (or later) installed on your system.

If you choose to run the CGI/web interface with DHCPStatus, then you'll need to run a web server on your DHCPD server.  The userid that the web server runs as will need read access to your dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files.   Alternatively, if you want to use the web interface but don't want to install a web server on your DHCPD server, then you could run the CGI script from another machine that had access to the dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files via, say, an NFS mount.

There are no pre-requisites for the command-line interface to DHCPStatus (other than, obviously, Perl and read access to your DHCPD files).  The command-line version assumes that your terminal display width is 80 characters (you can easily change this width value in a .ini file).  However, if you have the Perl Term::ReadKey package installed on your system, DHCPStatus will use it to determine your screen width (see http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=TermReadKey).

Right HERE !!!

See the INSTALL file.

At present, DHCPStatus only reports on the dynamic component of DHCP, ie. the dynamic pool of IP addresses defined by the "range" statements in each "subnet" statement in dhcpd.conf. Information in "group" and "host" statements is ignored. The reason for this is that I wrote these scripts to keep track of where all my dynamic IP addresses were going, and how many I had free - I already knew about the static stuff. However, I plan to add info about groups and hosts soon - it will make DHCPStatus more useful.

Also, things like bootp parameters are ignored. If we were using DHCP for bootp here where I work, I'd add it in, but we don't. I might add bootp information in some time.

DHCPStatus assumes that your dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files contain the correct syntax. If they don't, you'll either get an "internal server error" from your web server as the CGI script goes off the rails trying to parse the error, or (less likely, I think I've taken care this), the scripts will go into an infinite loop, your browser will hang, and you'll probably have a web server process spinning its wheels on the server. I didn't put too much effort into checking syntax, since I figured that a) DHCPD probably won't run if dhcpd.conf has a syntax error, and b) you're in real strife if your dhcpd.leases file has a syntax error.

There's also a problem with options and parameters within a "pool" statement in DHCPD V3.0 dhcpd.conf files not being displayed (see below).

The DHCPD 3.0 server introduces a lot of new features that weren't present in 2.0 (server failover, conditional behaviour, DDNS, and other good stuff).  As a result, the syntax of the dhcpd.conf and dhcpd.leases files has been extended.

 
DHCPStatus V0.53 will work with DHCPD V3.0 file formats (or at least it has as far as I've tested it).  That doesn't mean that DHCPStatus will display any of the new features, it just means that at least it won't crash on you with a syntax error.  Versions of DHCPStatus prior to V0.54 will only work with 2.0 and earlier releases of DHCPD (ie. they'll most likely crash if you run them against DHCPD V3.0 files).

One slight problem is introduced with the dhcpd.conf V3.0 file format.  Up till DHCPD V2.0, network parameters and options (eg. dns server, wins server, broadcast address) could only be defined globally or at a subnet level.  As of DHCPD V3.0, it is possible to define pools of addresses within a subnet, and specify options for each pool.  DHCPStatus doesn't recognise option definitions within "pool" statements (yet), it ignores them.  So, if you use pools under DHCPD V3.0, be aware that the options that are displayed in DHCPStatus for a particular subnet might be over-ridden by options at the pool level.  If you don't use DHCPD V3.0 with options inside "pool" statements, you don't have to worry about any of this.  One day I might fix it.

This product is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. However, if you find this product useful and wish to offer appreciation for it, then please make a contribution through the Sourceforge Donation System.