Would be nice to support Proxy-DHCP

Hi,

I’m currently testing MAAS in a network connected to the internet by a DOCSIS router with integrated DNS, DHCP, and other services that are required to run.

Hosts must request their DHCP address from this router in order to be registered in its DNS and other services.

Until recently, I was serving PXE boot images from a different machine running dnsmasq and configured as a dhcp proxy, i.e. forwarding dhcp request to the DOCSIS router and adding the PXE.required options.

This was working very well and stable. When machines were trying to PXE boot, only the dnsmasq was answering, but forwarding the request to the router, adding its options, and passing them to the PXE-booting machine. Sounds complicated, but was working very well and stable, and, especially, avoiding any configuration problems of overlapping DHCP-ranges.

But when having MAAS in the same network, it causes trouble. Even when carefully configuring distinct address ranges for both dhcp servers (DOCSIS router and MAAS), it causes network confusion, because when MAAS answers regular DHCP-requests faster than the router, it is not recognized by the router and it’s DNS is not updated.

Therefore, it would be quite nice and useful, if MAAS could perform proxy-DHCP as an option, just the way dnsmasq does. That way one could just let the regular DNS+DHCP-Server continue to do it’s job and register all machines, even if the request goes through MAAS.

And it would not break the regular network funktion if MAAS needs to be turned off temporarily in favour of other PXE services (e.g. to install desktop machines interactively over PXE).

regards