Client Classing
Clients can be separated into classes, and treated differently depending on what class they are in. This separation can be done either with a conditional statement, or with a match statement within the class declaration. It is possible to specify a limit on the total number of clients within a particular class or subclass that may hold leases at one time, and it is possible to specify automatic subclassing based on the contents of the client packet.
To add clients to classes based on conditional evaluation, you can specify a matching expression in the class statement:
class "ras-clients" {
match if substring (option dhcp-client-identifier, 1, 3) = "RAS";
}
Note that whether you use matching expressions or add statements (or both) to classify clients, you must always write a class declaration for any class that you use. If there will be no match statement and no in-scope statements for a class, the declaration should look like this:
class "ras-clients" {
}
Subclasses
In addition to classes, it is possible to declare subclasses. A subclass is a class with the same name as a regular class, but with a specific submatch expression which is hashed for quick matching. This is essentially a speed hack - the main difference between five classes with match expressions and one class with five subclasses is that it will be quicker to find the subclasses. Subclasses work as follows:
class "allocation-class-1" {
match pick-first-value (option dhcp-client-identifier, hardware);
}
class "allocation-class-2" {
match pick-first-value (option dhcp-client-identifier, hardware);
}
subclass "allocation-class-1" 1:8:0:2b:4c:39:ad;
subclass "allocation-class-2" 1:8:0:2b:a9:cc:e3;
subclass "allocation-class-1" 1:0:0:c4:aa:29:44;
subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
pool {
allow members of "allocation-class-1";
range 10.0.0.11 10.0.0.50;
}
pool {
allow members of "allocation-class-2";
range 10.0.0.51 10.0.0.100;
}
}
The data following the class name in the subclass declaration is a constant value to use in matching the match expression for the class. When class matching is done, the server will evaluate the match expression and then look the result up in the hash table. If it finds a match, the client is considered a member of both the class and the subclass.
Subclasses can be declared with or without scope. In the above example, the sole purpose of the subclass is to allow some clients access to one address pool, while other clients are given access to the other pool, so these subclasses are declared without scopes. If part of the purpose of the subclass were to define different parameter values for some clients, you might want to declare some subclasses with scopes.
In the above example, if you had a single client that needed some configuration parameters, while most didn't, you might write the following subclass declaration for that client:
subclass "allocation-class-2" 1:08:00:2b:a1:11:31 {
option root-path "samsara:/var/diskless/alphapc";
filename "/tftpboot/netbsd.alphapc-diskless";
}
In this example, we've used subclassing as a way to control address allocation on a per-client basis. However, it's also possible to use subclassing in ways that are not specific to clients - for example, to use the value of the vendor-class-identifier option to determine what values to send in the vendor-encapsulated-options option. An example of this is shown under the VENDOR ENCAPSULATED OPTIONS head in the dhcp-options(5) manual page.
