Some of you may have noticed that the blog’s been a little quiet lately. Partly that’s down to the day job turning a bit more physical (less time sat at a keyboard, more time stood in front of / behind a rack); partly that’s down to me having an idea for a project but that depending on a series of other projects.
A few weeks ago I migrated my server from a physical box to a KVM instance. That leaves that physical machine sitting around doing nothing at the moment. It’s a nice little device – low power, small but powerful enough – that I think I want to do something with it. What I’m thinking of doing is taking a small, USB modem and monitoring the house phone line for Caller ID; this can then be forwarded to MythTV as an on-screen notification. Also, the UPS that the computer (and our networking equipment) was on is currently not being monitored, so having something to plug the UPS into again would be an advantage.
The problem with that computer, though – and the reason I moved off it in the first place – is that the SSD causes random freezes. So my plan is to boot the machine disklessly.
However, before I can do that, I want to tidy up the DHCP on our network. We currently have two Class-C networks in the house; one for my machines and one for his. Due to history, that means we run two DHCP servers, neither of which is authoritative. This works, but is a bit of a mess, so what we want to do is consolidate on one network and one DHCP server. I would, however, like to keep some of the options (like DDNS) on my hosts, that he doesn’t want on his.
Now, reconfiguring the DHCP server to do this shouldn’t be too hard a job, but I want to test the configuration before I make it live. So, the other day I set up a VirtualBox machine with ISC DHCP-Server on it and went looking for DHCP test scripts. They are like hen’s teeth! What I’m looking for, essentially, is a program where I can say “If I pretend to be this MAC address, what IP will you give me? What if I also add this client option?” and so on. I found dhquery.py which looked promising, but failed due to the python module it depends on going out of date. My current line of enquiry, then is Perl’s Net::DHCPClient, but the magnitude of the task (handling command line options, potentially saving the lease so that it can be released by another call etc etc) is kinda making me balk at the moment.
So, basically, that’s where I am at the moment. Either looking for a nice DHCP test program, or writing my own.