How to install DHCP server on Ubuntu

Today I had to set up dhcp server on a machine running Ubuntu 9.04. The machine was supposed to serve 10 other machine running ubuntu/windows xp. Here is the steps I followed.

Install static IP on the machine. ( I selected 192.168.0.1 as the IP for the machine running dhcpd )

$ sudo apt-get install dhcp3-server

Now edit the /etc/dhcp3/dhcp3d.conf.
The default config file supplied with the dhcpd package is some what cumbersome. I replaced it with the following simple file


# dhcpd.conf config file.

authoritative;

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.20 192.168.0.250;
option domain-name "mynet.local";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255;
option routers 192.168.0.1;
# next-server 192.168.0.1;
# get-lease-hostnames true;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;

}

Then I restarted the server .

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

The above configuration file will serve IP range from 192.168.0.20 to 192.168.0.250. If you have a different IP scheme modify the values as required. In fact , there are several other options for dhcpd which you can control. The original config file has some examples settings explained in it.

If you have multiple interfaces on the machine, modify /etc/default/dhcp3-server file to specify which interface the server should run.