dhcpcd For Linux

dhcpcd is an open source, portable and freely distributed command-line utility that has been engineered to act as a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) client that’s RFC2131, RFC2132 and RFC1541 compliant.

Key features include support for DHCP over FireWire, ​user class support, ​​domain search support, IPv4LL support, ZeroConf or APIPA support, nNode-specific client identifiers, support for classless static routes, as well as support for SIP servers.

The program supports DHCP over InfiniBand, includes various ​TimeZone options, ​IPv6 router soliciation, SixRD, ​IPv6 router advertisement options for DNS configuration, link carrier detection, support for wireless SSID profiles, ARP ping profile support, and much more.

Simple, it grabs an IP address, as well as other information that it requires from a DHCP server, attempts to setup the network interface, and tries to renew the lease time. Being a command-line program, it includes a wide variety of options that can be viewed at a glance with the ‘dhcpcd --help’ command.

Among these, we can mention the ability to specify a script, a custom configuration file, a network interface to enable, timeout in seconds, reboot in seconds, leasetime in seconds, client ID, as well as to whitelist and blacklist address.

Even though it can be found on the main software repositories of several distributions of Linux, the program is easily installable straight from the source tarball distributed for free here on Softpedia.

Simply download the bzipped archive (tar.bz2) file, save it somewhere on your PC, use the default archive manager to extract it, open your favorite terminal emulator application and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/dhcpcd-6.6.4).

To configure/optimize and compile dhcpcd, run the ‘./configure && make’ command, followed by either of the ‘make install’ as root or ‘sudo make install’ as a privileged user commands to install it system wide.