Cisco IOS routers and layer 3 switches can be configured as DHCP server. It’s quite easy to do this and in this short lesson I want to explain to you how to do this and how to verify your configuration. If you are a little fuzzy how DHCP works, take a look at my introduction to DHCP first.
Let’s use the following topology:
Above we have a router that I will call ‘DHCP’. The router and computer are connected to each other using a simple switch and in the same VLAN. We will use the 192.168.12.0 /24 subnet for this demonstration. Let’s prepare the interface first:
DHCP(config)#interface fastEthernet 0/0
DHCP(config-if)#no shutdown
DHCP(config-if)#ip address 192.168.12.1 255.255.255.0
Now let’s configure DHCP server:
DHCP(config)#ip dhcp pool MYPOOL
DHCP(dhcp-config)#network 192.168.12.0 255.255.255.0
Use the ip dhcp pool command to create a DHCP pool and give it a name. This DHCP pool will use network 192.168.12.0 /24. Basically this is all you have to do to get DHCP server going, there is no need to start a service or something. We can verify that we have DHCP clients using the following command:
DHCP#show ip dhcp binding
Bindings from all pools not associated with VRF:
IP address Client-ID/ Lease expiration Type
Hardware address/
User name
192.168.12.2 0063.6973.636f.2d63. Mar 02 2002 12:24 AM Automatic
6330.372e.3132.3265.
2e30.3030.302d.4661.
302f.30
Above you can see that we have a DHCP client and it received IP address 192.168.12.2. In production networks we will also use DHCP to hand out some other useful things like a default gateway, DNS server and more. Let’s see how we can do this:
DHCP(config)#ip dhcp pool MYPOOL
DHCP(dhcp-config)#default-router 192.168.12.1
DHCP(dhcp-config)#dns-server 208.67.222.222
Above I configured IP address 192.168.12.1 as the default gateway for the DHCP clients with the default-router command. The dns-server commands lets us specify a DNS server.
Something else you might want to do is exclude a number of IP addresses. With the configuration so far our DHCP server will hand out IP address .2,3,4,5,6 etc. Here’s how to do it:
Before you create the dhcp pool, you should configure the ip dhcp excluded-address command.
That’s always a good idea.
How i can configure a fast-Ethernet interface to act as a DHCP client? and, is there any configuration we need to do apart from the configuration you have shown in DHCP server for that?
Hi Rohan,
You can configure a FastEthernet interface to use DHCP client by using the “ip address dhcp” command under the interface.
That’s it…
Rene
thank you very good but i wanna to know Are the messages (discover,offer,request and ack ) still broadcast or change ?