Windows DHCP support ?

[thomaschristory]

Howdy,

Love the idea of this plugin, I was thinking of doing one myself.
The doc is not really clear on how the dhcp connection is made.
Would it support the windows DHCP server ?

Cheers,

Thomas

[peteeckel]

@thomaschristory Sorry for delay, I'm quite busy these days, and as your question is a generic one it should be explained properly.

Generally, NetBox and its plugins, such as NetBox DNS (where I am still answering the same question from time to time, so you're in good company) and NetBox DHCP are basically a database with a GUI and some fancy APIs that can be used to store data required for the configuration of network devices, DNS servers and, in this case, DHCP servers.

Actually doing the configuration is out of scope for all of them - since the configuration methods vary widely between devices and server solutions they are left for either specialised plugins (such as, in the case of NetBox DNS, netbox-plugin-bind-provisioner or octodns-netbox-dns), or for other provisioning tools such as Ansible, Saltstack or whatever is the chosen tool in your environment.

Given the fact that NetBox DHCP is pretty young, no ecosystem of that kind has developed yet. We are working on a solution for our customers, and there will probably be a generic open source solution as well mid-term (that will definitely be Kea-focussed), but currently you're on a green field, which is good and bad news: Good, because you can integrate with whatever DHCP server solution you prefer using the provisioning tool you prefer, bad because you have to do it yourself (and are very welcome to share your solution!).

Since this could be the starting point of an ongoing, potentially very interesting discussion I'm moving this to "Discussions" - I hoe you don't mind.