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I have a dream.

My dream is that one day, a giant carrot carved into the shape of a submarine will sail down the Thames before sinking below the waves to take back America using only the power of latin.

But also, I want for machines that are on my local network to be accessible as “$hostname.d.water.gkhs.net” to everyone else on the same local network. That’s a more technical dream, and this is how I did it:

first, we google “smoothwall dhcp to dns”. The first result seems to be exactly what we need, so we click it, and find outselves on Kryogenix, the website of Aquarius, who I have known for somewhere close to a decade, which is an aeon in internet time. The article is now close seven years old, and while its lost its styling, it is (a) entirely what I want to do (b) comprehensive and (c) now completely broken.

The new page that Douglas Warner’s dhcp2dnrd script lives is now somewhere else on the site, and appears to be having some kind of formatting problem, but can still be downloaded from this direct link. At the bottom of this is a link to my own version of this file, with all these changes already made.

Although the the class::date problem no longer exists, a few other things that have changed since the article was released. So, this is what to do to get it working. Most of this is built on the stuff sill said already in his article, just updated for Smoothwall 3.0:

Log in to your Smoothwall box over ssh (If you cannot do this, you need to go to the web interface, Services, Remote Access, and tick SSH. Then, using your favourite terminal, log in to the same IP, port 222. Username root, password whatever you chose when you set up the firewall so long ago. I do hope you remember it.

mkdir dhcp2dnrd; cd dhcp2dnrd # (Being neat and tidy is good)

wget http://www.silfreed.net/download/progs/dhcp2dnrd.pl
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/D/DL/DLUX/Class-Date-1.1.9.tar.gz

tar xzvf Class-Date-1.1.9.tar.gz # to extract the perl module.
mv Class-Date-1.1.9/Date* /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/Class/ # to copy the perl module in place
vim dhcp2dnrd.pl # Or use your personal favourite editor. Unless it’s emacs or something, because I don’t think that’s installed.

Personally, I change the “home.net” line to “d.water.gkhs.net”, because it fits my network model better. You do need to change the “$dhcpdpath” to “/usr/etc/dhcpd.leases”, however.

Finally, smoothwall no longer uses dnrd, so either comment out the entire bottom of the file after “# restart dnrd”, or rewrite that to work. I’ve modified the code in mine to “work”, but it’s mostly cargo culty.

Downloading Douglas’ script, I found it had windows line endings, which confused me. You can convert it back to unix format in vim with “:set fileformat=unix”. If you’re using mine you shouldn’t need to.

Finally, run it, check the output of /etc/hosts is roughly what you expect, then throw the script into cron like this:
cp dhcp2dnrd.pl /etc/cron.often/

And that appears to work. You can grab my copy of the code from github should you want to.

2 comments
  1. Thanks for the instructions. Worked like a charm -except I needed to “chmod +x /dhcp2dnrd.pl” before executing it. Save a lot of work updating things manually on Smoothwall. For some reason my machine names were starting to have external IP addresses returned by an external DNS -probably friendly redirects trying to help me find my own machines.

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