LDAP Support in DHCP
Original Author: Brian Masney <masneyb@gftp.org>
Current Maintainer: David Cantrell <dcantrell@redhat.com>
Last updated 07-Jul-2009

This document describes setting up the DHCP server to read it's configuration
from LDAP.  This work is based on the IETF document
draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-01.txt included in the doc directory.  For the
latest version of this document, please see
http://dcantrel.fedorapeople.org/dhcp/ldap-patch/

First question on most people's mind is "Why do I want to store my
configuration in LDAP?"  If you run a small DHCP server, and the configuration
on it rarely changes, then you won't need to store your configuration in LDAP.
But, if you have several DHCP servers, and you want an easy way to manage your
configuration, this can be a solution.

The first step will be to setup your LDAP server.  I am using OpenLDAP from
www.openldap.org.  Building and installing OpenLDAP is beyond the scope of
this document.  There is plenty of documentation out there about this.  Once
you have OpenLDAP installed, you will have to edit your slapd.conf file.  I
added the following 2 lines to my configuration file:

include         /etc/ldap/schema/dhcp.schema
index           dhcpHWAddress eq
index           dhcpClassData eq

The first line tells it to include the dhcp schema file.  You will find this
file under the contrib directory in this distribution.  You will need to copy
this file to where your other schema files are (maybe /etc/openldap/schema/).
The second line sets up an index for the dhcpHWAddress parameter.  The third
parameter is for reading subclasses from LDAP every time a DHCP request comes
in.  Make sure you run the slapindex command and restart slapd to have these
changes to into effect.

Now that you have LDAP setup, you should be able to use gq
(http://biot.com/gq/) to verify that the dhcp schema file is loaded into LDAP.
Pull up gq, and click on the Schema tab.  Go under objectClasses, and you
should see at least the following object classes listed: dhcpClass, dhcpGroup,
dhcpHost, dhcpOptions, dhcpPool, dhcpServer, dhcpService, dhcpSharedNetwork,
dhcpSubClass, and dhcpSubnet.  If you do not see these, you need to check over
your LDAP configuration before you go any further.

You should now be ready to build DHCP.  If you would like to enable LDAP in
dhcpd, you will need to perform the following steps:

  * Apply the patch here to the unpacked ISC dhcp source tree.
  * Regenerate the configure script (requires GNU autoconf and automake):
        aclocal
        libtoolize --copy --force
        autoconf
        autoheader
        automake --foreign --add-missing --copy
  * Run ./configure with the '--with-ldap' argument to enable OpenLDAP.
    If you want LDAP over SSL, also use the '--with-ldapcrypto' argument.
  * Run 'make' to build ISC dhcp.

Once you have DHCP installed, you will need to setup your initial plaintext
config file. In my /etc/dhcpd.conf file, I have:

ldap-server "localhost";
ldap-port 389;
ldap-username "cn=DHCP User, dc=ntelos, dc=net";
ldap-password "blah";
ldap-base-dn "dc=ntelos, dc=net";
ldap-method dynamic;
ldap-debug-file "/var/log/dhcp-ldap-startup.log";

If SSL has been enabled at compile time, the dhcp server trys to use TLS if
possible, but continues without TLS if not.

You can modify this behaviour using following option in /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf:

ldap-ssl <off | ldaps | start_tls | on>
   off:       disables TLS/LDAPS.
   ldaps:     enables LDAPS -- don't forget to set ldap-port to 636.
   start_tls: enables TLS using START_TLS command
   on:        enables LDAPS if ldap-port is set to 636 or TLS in 
              other cases.

See also "man 5 ldap.conf" for description the following TLS related 
options:
   ldap-tls-reqcert, ldap-tls-ca-file, ldap-tls-ca-dir, ldap-tls-cert
   ldap-tls-key, ldap-tls-crlcheck, ldap-tls-ciphers, ldap-tls-randfile

The ldap-init-retry <num> enables an optional ldap connect retry loop with
the specified number of retries with a one second sleep between each try
during the initial startup of the dhcp server.
It allows to catch the condition, that the (remote) ldap server is not yet
started at the start time of the dhcp server.

All of these parameters should be self explanatory except for the ldap-method.
You can set this to static or dynamic.  If you set it to static, the
configuration is read once on startup, and LDAP isn't used anymore.  But, if
you set this to dynamic, the configuration is read once on startup, and the
hosts that are stored in LDAP are looked up every time a DHCP request comes
in.

When the optional statement ldap-debug-file is specified, on startup the DHCP
server will write out the configuration that it generated from LDAP.  If you
are getting errors about your LDAP configuration, this is a good place to
start looking.

The next step is to set up your LDAP tree. Here is an example config that will
give a 10.100.0.x address to machines that have a host entry in LDAP.
Otherwise, it will give a 10.200.0.x address to them.  (NOTE: replace
dc=ntelos, dc=net with your base dn). If you would like to convert your
existing dhcpd.conf file to LDIF format, there is a script
dhcpd-conf-to-ldap that will convert it for you.  Type
dhcpd-conf-to-ldap --help to see the usage information for this script.

# You must specify the server's host name in LDAP that you are going to run
# DHCP on and point it to which config tree you want to use.  Whenever DHCP
# first starts up, it will do a search for this entry to find out which
# config to use
dn: cn=brian.ntelos.net, dc=ntelos, dc=net
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpServer
cn: brian.ntelos.net
dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net

# Here is the config tree that brian.ntelos.net points to.
dn: cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: DHCP Service Config
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpService
dhcpPrimaryDN: dc=ntelos, dc=net
dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
dhcpStatements: default-lease-time 600
dhcpStatements: max-lease-time 7200

# Set up a shared network segment
dn: cn=WV Test, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: WV
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpSharedNetwork

# Set up a subnet declaration with a pool statement.  Also note that we have
# a dhcpOptions object with this entry
dn: cn=10.100.0.0, cn=WV Test, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: 10.100.0.0
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpSubnet
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpOption: domain-name-servers 10.100.0.2
dhcpOption: routers 10.100.0.1
dhcpOption: subnet-mask 255.255.255.0
dhcpOption: broadcast-address 10.100.0.255
dhcpNetMask: 24

# Set up a pool for this subnet.  Only known hosts will get these IPs
dn: cn=Known Pool, cn=10.100.0.0, cn=WV Test, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: Known Pool
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpPool
dhcpRange: 10.100.0.3 10.100.0.254
dhcpPermitList: deny unknown-clients

# Set up another subnet declaration with a pool statement
dn: cn=10.200.0.0, cn=WV Test, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: 10.200.0.0
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpSubnet
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpOption: domain-name-servers 10.200.0.2
dhcpOption: routers 10.200.0.1
dhcpOption: subnet-mask 255.255.255.0
dhcpOption: broadcast-address 10.200.0.255
dhcpNetMask: 24

# Set up a pool for this subnet. Only unknown hosts will get these IPs
dn: cn=Known Pool, cn=10.200.0.0, cn=WV Test, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
cn: Known Pool
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpPool
dhcpRange: 10.200.0.3 10.200.0.254
dhcpPermitList: deny known clients

# Set aside a group for all of our known MAC addresses
dn: cn=Customers, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpGroup
cn: Customers

# Host entry for my laptop
dn: cn=brianlaptop, cn=Customers, cn=DHCP Service Config, dc=ntelos, dc=net
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
cn: brianlaptop
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00

You can use the command ldapadd to load all of these entries into your LDAP
server. After you load this, you should be able to start up DHCP. If you run
into problems reading the configuration, try running dhcpd with the -d flag.
If you still have problems, edit the site.conf file in the DHCP source and
add the line: COPTS= -DDEBUG_LDAP and recompile DHCP. (make sure you run make
clean and rerun configure before you rebuild).

DHCPv6 requires a separate instance of the dhcpd server from the
DHCPv4 server.  

It is convenient to use distinct LDAP login DNs for the two servers,
and setup LDAP access restrictions in the LDAP server, so that each
DHCP server only has access to its own data.

You will need to create a separate configuration file,
call it /etc/dhcpd6.conf.  For example:

ldap-server "localhost";
ldap-port 389;
ldap-username "cn=DHCPv6 User, dc=ntelos, dc=net";
ldap-password "blahblah";
ldap-base-dn "dc=ntelos, dc=net";
ldap-method dynamic;
ldap-debug-file "/var/log/dhcp-ldap-startup.log";

And use these command line arguments to dhcpd:

dhcpd eth... -6 -cf /etc/dhcpd6.conf -pf /var/run/dhcpd6.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcpd6/dhcpd.leases

For DHCPv6, the client configuration is the same, but substitute the
Client ID for the Ethernet hardware address.  Here is an example of a
host definition for a DHCPv6 client:

dn: cn=examplehost,cn=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX::/64,cn=Network-eth1,cn=DHCPv6,dc=example,dc=com
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
cn: examplehost
dhcpClientId: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
dhcpStatements: fixed-address6 XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX
option host-name "examplehost.ipv6.example.com"
option domain-name "ipv6.example.com"

Indexes created Sun Jun 30 11:05:36 MDT 2024