The Problem

The Freizeit Computer Club Kufstein has organized and managed various lan parties over the past few years, with one problem usually occuring: how to provide a speedy registration for the clients in the network and to have all information about the users available for the server..

DHCP provided a speedy registration for the clients, but it didn't give any clues about the users by their ip addresses.

The fixed assignment of ip addresses via DNS allowed conclusions about the users, but on the side of the clients it meant increasing support and installation procedures. There was no way of making sure that users actually registered by their assigned ip addresses, so that they could be identified clearly. Another problem arose with identical ip addresses in the network.

The Solution

This problem gave birth to the underlying idea of ANDReA. ANDReA is an almost automatic system that allows automatic registration of all users in the network by means of DHCP, DNS and a web application. The web application generates a survey of the ip addresses assigned, the users and the status of the ip addresses (online/offline). Find more at: "features"

Realization

The DHCP server (ip address 172.16.01) uses a network card with two ip network addresses which are configured in different ways. ANDReA makes use of a boot net (e.g. Class B Net: 172.16.0.0/255.255.0.0) and a real net (e.g. Class C Netz: 192.168.10.0/255.255.255.0).The boot net serves to identify the user. After a client has been assigned an ip address in the network, he can gain access to the website by the url http://172.16.0.1/ and register with the user's number and a code given to him on admission. At that point of time, the user has NO access to the real net.

Once the registration has been completed successfully, (for security reasons all umlaute and special characters will be removed), ANDReA will record the data into a database which is used to produce the config data for the DNS and the DHCP server. This is done every minute. The lease time can be changed (e.g. 30 seconds - usually it should only take 1 Minute for a client to have his ip address assigned). Now the user will be given an ip address from the real net, and he can make use of all services offered by the real net (ftp-, www-, gameserver...) The successful registration is completed by a following restart.