Whether you run a small business network, or just your own home network, you’ve probably made use of what I call “plastic routers” – off-the-shelf devices that you plug in to share your single internet hookup between multiple computers. These convenient little boxes provide routing, basic firewalling, DHCP, and occasionally even DNS support for your network, via a handy web interface. However, if you find these devices to be too limiting, or you just want to flex your geek muscle by doing it all yourself, one of the first things you’ll need is a DHCP server.

This post will walk you through installing and configuring dhcp3-server on an Ubuntu server. The nice thing about this is that the resource requirements are very low – I use an old HP Pavilion computer running a scant 64 MB of RAM with a sloth-like 667 MHz processor, which is more than enough to also serve as my network’s DNS server and firewall. Installing Ubuntu in such a slim environment can be vexatious, but it runs just fine once installed; that, however, is beyond the scope of this post – for now I will simply assume you have Ubuntu installed and ready to go.

This is the first in a short series of articles about networking set up and configuration; this post will serve as reference material for later how-tos, including a detailed description of how I make effective use of VirtualBox’s internal network feature to virtualize entire networks of VMs. (more…)