What to do for best with DHCP reservations?

[Kyle]

We have quite a lot of DHCP reservations that i am toying with the idea of restructuring them all. We currently have all the servers, wireless AP's, printers and all the switches which all have reserved Ip in our range. This is becoming a pain now as there are so many.

 

What is the best way to deal with this? Should we/could we have all our switches in a different ip range to our own network?

 

Can we do anything with your printers Ip?

 

I guess the AP's would have to be on our range or at least on the range of our other switches?

 

What is the best thing for this?

[ChrisH]

The IP addresses for APs and switches are generally there for management purposes apart from some scenarios with APs regarding authing with a RADIUS server etc.

 

You can manage these using the netsh command and a clever script or you could do a backup from the DHCP console and open it in text editor and alter all the values you want and restore it. Will be a lot easier than messing with the interface. I personally would make up a spread sheet with the neccessary information and have a script enter the values. This would also be a good piece of documentation for disaster recovery etc.

[webman]

We have our static devices (APs, printers, switches, servers) in the same subnet as everything else, but the DHCP server doesn't give out addresses in the range.

[mitcheln]

Hi,

I think you should keep your printers in the existing range. Placing them in a different IP space is inpractical because you will have to provide a means of routing traffic between your clients and printers. (unless they are shared from a dual homed server, geez the possibilities)

I can't from experience advise on your wireless access points, but the received wisdom ASFAK is that ones wireless network should be isolated at least by logical means such as using a different IP range and at best by physical means (or VLAN) - i.e. you maintain a means of controlling traffic between the wireless and wired networks by forcing any communication through a firewall.

The switches can be put on a different IP range quite happily.

Spose most of the above depends on network equipment being used.

If you're running out of addresses you could consider revising your addressing to provide for more hosts.

Regardless of what you end up doing, make sure you document it.