[Dnsmasq-discuss] Specifying boot options for specific type of hardware.

[Simon Kelley]

Josef Wolf wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 12:37:43PM +0100, Simon Kelley wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the quick answer!
> 
> 
>>>I would like to specify specific boot options for a set of machines which
>>>can be identified by the first three MAC octetts. I have tried this:
>>>
>>>dhcp-range=192.168.1.130,192.168.1.150,15m
>>>dhcp-range=192.168.1.155,192.168.1.190,15m
>>>dhcp-host=00:50:9c:*:*:*,myvendor
>>>dhcp-boot=net:myvendor,/tftpboot/myvendor-boot,tftpserver,192.168.1.253
>>>
>>>But this (obviously) fails because dhcp-host gives no way to set a
>>>network-id.
>>>
>>
>>You can set the network-id in the dhcp-host, your example is almost 
>>correct, just change the dhcp-host line to:
>>
>>dhcp-host=00:50:9c:*:*:*,net:myvendor
> 
> 
> Hmm, the man-page seems to be inaccurate here.  The dhcp-host section
> refers to the dhcp-range section for the <network-id> description.  But
> the dhcp-range section says:
> 
>    When it is prefixed with 'net:' then its meaning changes from setting
>    a tag to matching it.
> 
> That is, the meaning is reversed.

Sorry, it's actually the configuration language which is inconsistent. 
In a dhcp-host line, network-ids _must_ be prefixed by "net:". A name 
not prefixed by "net:" (as in your example) will be interpreted as a 
hostname. For dhcp-host lines, only tag setting function is available, 
not the matching function. I'll try and make the man page clearer (it is 
confusing), but the real fix for this is a dnsmasq version 3, with 
properly designed configuration language.


> 
> 
> An other problem is the specification of the ip-address.  When I omit the
> ip-address from the dhcp-host setting, I get
> 
>    BOOTP(eth0) 00:03:12:54:ab:de no address configured
> 
> How do I specify that for the given range of mac addresses dynamic
> ip-adresses should be used?
> 

 From that log line, it looks like your host is using BOOTP, not DHCP. 
BOOTP is a older subset of DHCP, and doesn't support dynamic address 
allocation. Unless you can persuade your hosts to do DHCP, you will have 
to use static address allocation.

HTH

Simon.