[WinMac] Re: fixed IP numbers in a DHCP range

Michael Eilon(mgeilon[at]geocities.com)
Fri, 29 Jan 1999 23:21:14 +0800

At 8:32 PM -0500 28/1/99, Alex Dearden wrote:
>> It's bad practice to "nail" an IP address in a DHCP environment,
>>because
>>if you take the device offline and the address lease expires, and then you
>>bring the device back online you'll have two devices with the same IP
>>address... And all hell breaks loose.
>
>So, increase the time of the lease. If NT needs an IP address and there
>is a reserved address but the device is offline. It'll use that address.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but why not simply have the DHCP server
reserve IP numbers based on the ethernet address of the device?

Not that I'm an expert on DHCP, but my colleague who's in charge of the
Departmental Server (Debian Linux) has DHCP set up in this way: we have a
number of printers (and really old Macs) that can't handle DHCP, so I get
him the ethernet addresses, and he allocates a fixed IP number for them.

Haven't had any problems with this setup, even if there's downtime for the
those devices... as far as I can make out, the DHCP server doesn't allocate
the "reserved" IP number until the device with the appropriate ethernet
number comes back online.

Maybe I'm missing something, and there are reasons why our setup is not
good in certain situations, but it seems like a painless way to have static
IP numbers in a DHCP environment.

Cheers,

Michael Eilon
Assistant computer manager
Dept. of Physics
University of Western Australia

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Jan 29 1999 - 07:28:54 PST