Friday, August 14, 2009

DNSMASQ and multiple DHCP networks with DHCP relay

I switched from MaraDNS to DNSMasq. DNSmasq is an excellent tool for small networks. Small networks are defined as something less than 1000 hosts. This is most networks! I love DNSMasq's simplicity. I also like how it bundles DHCP, DNS recursive server, DNS caching. The DHCP is surprisingly simple to use and configure and incredibly feature-full. For example, the DHCP server handles PXE clients requests for the next server. It also handles requests that are relayed, so you can provide multiple subnets DHCP service and do it based on the tag provided by the relayer. I also like how you can reuse the local (to the DNSmasq) machine's /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf to gather static entries and upstream recursive DNS caches. It seems simple to just reuse these files for the server and clients. You are essentially exporting the server's /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf to your clients.