ask a dhcp server to respond a petition only if a condition happens

[lulu_go]

Hello forum, this is my first question in a forum, most of the times I had found the answers in internet but not this time (I apologize for my english I speak spanish)

My problem is this, I have two dhcp server (dhcp3) in the same network, this network is a link layer network so every host is seen as directly connected. The two servers have debian lenny and there are near 13 AP mikrotik to give connection to the XO laptops (from the project one laptop per child). This is for two public schools (each one with one server) that are connected via a p2p connection and each one provides internet for the school and outdoor too. The servers are also file servers, proxy, etc.

Each time a laptop asks for an IP, it sends a broadcast message and this petition gets to both servers, now a days the first server that reply is the one the laptop associate with. What I want to do is, knowing the bandwith use of the ADSL, the clients connected to the server, and the cost to the AP that the laptop associate with, decide wich is the best server to be connected to. What I want to achive is to balance the load and to decide the optimum connection, because now it could happen that one server is very loaded and the other is free.

I tried to run dhcp with inetd and use tcp wrappers to invoke a script to check a condition before responding and, in case to be the best server, reply to the laptop, but i couldn't get the dhcp server to respond when I run it with inetd. Actually I don't know if this is the best thing to do to solve the problem

here is my inetd.conf
bootps dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/tcpd dhcpd3

thank you very much for your help
lulu

[scathefire]

you mean something like this? IBM Cluster information center, but that is probably not an option

a really lazy method could be, depending on how many hosts you are managing, just to split the scope between the two servers.

basically you are just going to have to cluster. google 'linux clustering dhcp' or 'debian clustering dhcp' something to that effect. there are a number of solutions out there.