How to re-address the whole site? (and why bother)

[kennysarmy]

Thanks for reading.

 

Our current ip scheme is our own:

10.10.1.18 to 10.10.4.255 - 3 day lease.

618 in use and 259 free addresses.

 

We are on the SWGfL who (ages ago) allocated us an ip scheme of:

10.7.40.16 to 10.7.43.253

(is this enough? my quick maths tells me it is OK)

 

Our internet access is through our own proxy and we use the product WINGATE. We have used this since I started here at the school when we only had 40 computers! Most things work OK, internet access is obviously fine, though we do have difficulty with things like ftp and video conferencing and have had to put in weird and wonderful solutions.

 

I am thinking we should move all our ip addresses over to the SWGfL's range so hopefully it will make life easier in the future and things like video conferencing can then just happen if needed from every desk.

 

All clients use DHCP and we have static IP's for things like servers, printers and switches, probably numbering 70 items in total)

 

We have ramesys coming in over the summer to upgrade some servers, change their roles and install some new servers.

I've asked them how much it would cost for them to re-address the site during the time they are here. They have quoted £2275 which is for 1 day planning, 2 days on site work, 0.5 day project management.

 

I thought I would get some comments from here before I respond to their quote.....I am able to put 2 technicians on this for 2 days if the reason their quote is so high is that they are quoting for someone to go around and turn on and off every device on the network.

 

 

This to me sounds like a massive amount of money for a relatively easy task, so am thinking perhaps I am missing something.

 

So, what would the procedure be to fall in line with the SWGfL's addresses?

and are other secondary schools using the ip ranges given out by their grid or do most do their own thing? PROS and CONS?

 

sorry for so many questions.

[SYNACK]

Just a few thoughts, most of the stuff is easy but some can be troublesome. If you are running AD the DNS setup, foward and reverse will need to be changed. You'll also need to be sure that you know where all of the staticly ip addressed stuff is. If you have not done so already it could be a good idea to set up the printers with reservations on your DHCP servers so as to centralise managment.

 

Is there any internal routing or filtering that you will need to reconfigure and are all of your client pcs pointed to servers for printing or directly to printer ips in some cases.

 

I would say that it should be manageble to do this yourself but you would want to have a very clear picture of how everything fits together currently before you start.

[enjay]

2 days work to change 70 IP numbers? Are they have a laugh??

 

Before making the change at the server, you open the web interface management console on whatever your first device is, change this to the new range and save it. Obviously, you will immediately lose sight of it, but that doesn't matter. You repeat this process for the other 69 devices and then change the server to the new range, at which point all your printers etc will spring back into life. There may be a handful which you'll need to do manually (servers, for example) but it won't be loads.

 

As for changing your workstations, the DHCP on them will pick up the new ranges the first time they turn on after the change. Since wake-on-lan works from the MAC not the IP address, this can still be used to turn them all on.

 

Renumbering your site is more like 2 HOURS - including coffee breaks - than it is 2 days.

[kennysarmy]

If you have not done so already it could be a good idea to set up the printers with reservations on your DHCP servers so as to centralise managment.

 

Already done - thanks.

 

 

Is there any internal routing or filtering that you will need to reconfigure and are all of your client pcs pointed to servers for printing or directly to printer ips in some cases.

 

No routing or filtering changes required and yes all clients point to either 1 of 2 server 2000 print servers.

[kennysarmy]

2 days work to change 70 IP numbers? Are they have a laugh??

 

Before making the change at the server, you open the web interface management console on whatever your first device is, change this to the new range and save it. Obviously, you will immediately lose sight of it, but that doesn't matter. You repeat this process for the other 69 devices and then change the server to the new range, at which point all your printers etc will spring back into life. There may be a handful which you'll need to do manually (servers, for example) but it won't be loads.

 

As for changing your workstations, the DHCP on them will pick up the new ranges the first time they turn on after the change. Since wake-on-lan works from the MAC not the IP address, this can still be used to turn them all on.

 

Renumbering your site is more like 2 HOURS - including coffee breaks - than it is 2 days.

 

Well that's kind of what I thought.

So procedure is:

printers, switches, servers -> clients.

[enjay]

Well that's kind of what I thought.

So procedure is:

printers, switches, servers -> clients.

 

That's how I did it a few years back. Just make sure you have a comprehensive list of all your static devices...

 

I know you said you've got reservations in place, but what I've also done is set the DHCP to give out IPs to the client starting from x.x.0.100 - that gives me plenty of space for the addition of more static devices like printers and switches in the future.

[CyberNerd]

Also I would be inclined to draw up a list of every server and every piece of software to make sure nothing is configured to be looking at an ip address. you may have scripts for various things that have been written using ip's.

 

btw. have you considered NATing your current network rather than changing it.

We operate a 172.16 range and just vlan or port forward anything that needs internal access.

[GrumbleDook]

Being honest I would make considerable use of MAC addresses to assign reserved addresses for fixed items such as printers, etc. I would not do it for certain servers (DCs, web server, etc) but a good number of them would be happy with it.

 

IIRC the command used was one from NT4 days ... dhcpcmd using addreservedIP or similar ... a hunt on Google or Technet will answer it. It meant we could (and still do) add a large number of reservations at the same time.

[Ric_]

As others have said, it is a relatively easy (if time consuming task) which certainly doesn't warrant the quote given - incidentally, I'm willing to do it for £500 less

 

There are also ways to export your current DHCP scope to a text file which can then be edited and imported back again.

[browolf]

if you attach to printers using hostnames, they can have dynamic ips.

 

what about if you put the old ips on the servers in as additional addresses. that way all the printers will still work. that just leaves the switches and you can gradually change the printers over (change to hostnames)