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After the Network Registrar DHCP server has given a client a lease, you can have that lease-state data written back to your LDAP server. Thus, you can store information such as the client's host name, the machine's MAC address, the state of the lease, and when the lease expires. Since a copy of this information is in a central place (your LDAP server), you can run queries to monitor your IP address usage or the state of your leases.
You can configure multiple independent LDAP servers that the Network Registrar DHCP server can use in preference order (for failover protection), or in round-robin fashion (for load balancing).
LDAP directory servers provide a way to name, manage, and access collections of attribute-value pairs. LDAP servers consist of entries that hold information about some thing or concept, such as a person or organization. Every entry in an LDAP server belongs to one or more object classes. The object class defines the attributes and their associated valid values. For example, the person object class might have an attribute to hold a person's Social Security number, which would be single-valued; or an attribute to hold a telephone number, which would ignore spaces and dashes. The schema defines an entry's valid attributes and their values. You can turn off schema checking if you want to use the attributes to hold other values. Or, you can change the schema by adding new object classes to an entry.
To use your LDAP server for DHCP queries, enter the MAC addresses of all your clients. You can optionally enter any other information on a per-client basis, such as a unique host name or if you are using client-class---exceptions to the client's client-class definition.
Any of the DHCP client-entry attributes that you can configure through Network Registrar can be stored in the LDAP server. All these attributes are of the type string.
For more information about these attributes, see the Network Registrar CLI Reference Guide.
The Network Registrar DHCP server can write lease-related data to pre-existing entries in LDAP-based directories. The data items written include:
Using the ldap command, you can map these attributes to any LDAP attributes with compatible data types.
The Network Registrar DHCP server can also read data from LDAP to control the address-leasing process. For example, a directory could contain a list of authorized devices, identified by MAC addresses. The DHCP server could then either deny addresses to other devices, or grant an address from a special pool of provisional addresses. Or, the clients listed in the directory could be given some type of special handling, with other clients given default treatment.
For more information about using Network Registrar with LDAP directories, see the Network Registrar User's Guide.
Posted: Thu Feb 3 10:44:38 PST 2000
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