BlueCat Networks, of Ontario, Canada, has used Linux to build a dedicated DHCP server that it says offers capabilities useful in enterprise VoIP (voice-over-IP) environments, including increased DHCP availability, reliability, and manageability. The Adonis 500 DHCP server is available in standard and embedded versions, and includes Java-based management software.

The Adonis 500 is claimed to be the world's first dedicated DHCP server
According to John Crespi, senior product manager, VoIP engenders special DHCP requirements that are best met by a dedicated device, or better yet, a dedicated device with a hot spare to failover to in the event of a hardware failure. The Adonis 500 and its larger Adonis 1000 sibling (which adds a DNS server based on BIND) offer such hot spare capabilities, along with optimizations for specific vendor hardware, MAC address filtering, and real-time lease viewers. “For example, the real-time lease viewer tells you who's got what, when it was granted, and when it expires. No more digging around in the log files,” Crespi says.

What's under the hood?

The Adonis 500 is a small system based on commodity x86 hardware in a 1U rack-mountable case. It has an Intel Celeron processor, clocked at 2.6GHz. It boots from a 40GB hard drive, and has 512MB of SDRAM.

An “embedded” version is also available, Crespi notes, for customers seeking the extra reliability of a solid state device. The embedded version boots from 1GB of Flash, and comes with 1GB of SDRAM.

The Adonis has a built-in 15 x 2 LCD display, which can be used for initial device configuration. Additionally, the Adonis offers standard PC monitor, mouse, and keyboard ports, and a commandline console interface.

Crespi says BlueCat based the Adonis on Debian Linux, initially, but that over time, the implementation has become more specialized. “It's really become our own distribution,” he notes.

The Linux implementation is based on a 2.4.22 Linux kernel, soon to be updated to 2.4.26, Crespi says. It includes a variety of standard open source software components, as well applications developed by BlueCat.

According to Crespi, the DHCP client shipped with Adonis is based on the ISC's (Internet System's Consortium's) reference implementation of the DHCP standard, but with “substantial changes.” BlueCat wrote Adonis's Java-based management interface, Crespi says.

The Adonis's primary interface is a Java client that can run on any Java-enabled desktop. It offers interfaces for configuring DHCP (and, in the case of the Adonis 1000, DNS), as well as tools that locate syntactical and logical errors in config files. Once configurations have been finalized, the Java client can be used to push new configurations to the device.

Availability

The Adonis 500 is available now, at a suggested price of $2,995. It comes with 90 days of support. A year of phone support is optionally available for $1,000, while a year of high-priority, 24×7 phone support is available for $1,500.

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