flopbear

flopbear is a configuration-less, single binary, non RFC compliant (for now) DHCP server for use in development and testing.

It's main use cases are situations where a temporary DHCP server is needed quickly. Ease of use is the primary objective, so that no time has to be spent installing and configuring software.

An example scenario is embedded development for an evaluation board that can only be accessed via Network, is configured to use DHCP by default and can not be connected to an existing network but has to be connected to a development machine directly (e.g. for security reasons).

For now flopbear is targeting only Linux and OpenBSD. Patches to support other platforms are very welcome.
If you are looking for a similar (but much better ;)) project targeting Windows have a look at David Anson's DHCPLite.

Getting started

flopbear can simply be started from the command line. The only required argument is the name of a configured network interface to listen on. Addresses in the range configured on the given interface will automatically be assigned to all DHCP clients. flopbear will assume that all addresses higher than that of the listening interface are free to be used and will assign them in ascending order.

$ ifconfig eth0 192.168.5.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
$ ./flopbear eth0

Building

Dependencies

• GNU Make

Compiling

flopbear is written in C and compiles to a single, statically linked binary. It can simply be build by calling GNU make:

Linux:

make

OpenBSD:

gmake

Acknowledgements

flopbear is partially based on Fritz Grimpen's dhcpd.

License

flopbear is distributed under the terms of the ISC license.

See LICENSE for details.