juga0 / charrua-core

A DHCP library in OCaml

Charrua DHCP - a DHCP client, server and wire frame encoder and decoder

charrua is an ISC-licensed DHCP library implementation in OCaml. It provides five packages:

• charrua-core: a library that handles wire traffic parsing and a server implementation
• charrua-client: a library for handling DHCP client state and messages
• charrua-client-lwt: a DHCP client library with timeouts and network read/write
• charrua-client-mirage: a MirageOS-compatible set of interfaces to charrua-client-lwt
• charrua-unix: a Unix DHCP server implementation

Charrua-core

Charrua-core consists of two modules, a Dhcp_wire responsible for parsing and constructing DHCP messages and a Dhcp_server module used for constructing DHCP servers.

You can browse the API for charrua-core at http://mirage.github.io/charrua-core/api

dhcp is a Mirage DHCP unikernel server based on charrua-core, included as a part of the MirageOS unikernel example and starting-point repository.

Features

• Dhcp_server supports a stripped down ISC dhcpd.conf, so you can probably just use your old dhcpd.conf. It also supports manual configuration building in OCaml.
• Dhcp_wire provides marshalling and unmarshalling utilities for DHCP, it is the base for Dhcp_server.
• Logic/sequencing is agnostic of IO and platform, so it can run on Unix as a process, as a Mirage unikernel or anything else.
• All DHCP options are supported at the time of this writing.
• Code is purely applicative.
• It's in OCaml, so it's pretty cool.

The name charrua is a reference to the, now extinct, semi-nomadic people of southern South America.

Charrua-client

charrua-client is a DHCP client powered by charrua-core.

The base library exposes a simple state machine in Dhcp_client for use in acquiring a DHCP lease.

charrua-client-lwt extends charrua-client with a functor Dhcp_client_lwt, using the provided modules for timing and networking logic, for convenient use by a program which might wish to implement a full client.

charrua-client-mirage exposes an additional Dhcp_client_mirage for direct use with the MirageOS library operating system.

Charrua-unix Server

charrua-unix is an ISC-licensed Unix DHCP daemon based on charrua-core.

Features

• Supports a stripped down ISC dhcpd.conf. A configuration sample can be found here
• Privilege dropping: the daemon doesn't run as root.
• Almost purely-functional code.
• Support for multiple interfaces/subnets.

Try charruad --help for options.

This project became one of the Mirage Pioneer projects.