DHCP best practice and advice again

[tosca925]

I have recently moved DHCP to another server and because of this i have read quite a few DHCP articles. I have 1000 address and the first 64 are excluded from the range.

 

I have kept this lot for severs and access points etc

Do i need to have these as reservations or just make then static.

 

I have at the other end of the range all my printers and switches which are in reservations.

DO i need these in reservations if they all have static IP address?

 

 

Do you really need to use reservations at all?

[Ric_]

IIRC you cannot reserve an exluded address anyway... one of your problems solved

 

Devices such as APs and printers, I would recommend DHCP reservations because you can easily change their addresses. Servers, switches, etc. I would recommend static addresses - these devices will prob need to know there addresses when the DHCP server is potentially unavilable.

[ChrisH]

Always make your servers static IPs. I like to use reserved addresses for printers and access points because more than anything it is easy to kkep track of what address is what.

[k-strider]

i third that advice...

[john]

Fourthed

[nsherin]

As a rule of thumb, I give all printers and servers static IPs (I'm pretty sure the Epson AcuLasers pretty much require this). Some admin PCs that use thin-client via Citrix to our local authority's finance system, plus all IT office machines are provided with fixed IPs, the rest are given DHCP. Wireless access points don't apply at our place, as we're not using wireless.

[Lord_Edam]

Static addresses for anything which is crucial to your infrastructure - switches & servers. Things you want to be able to function even when the network is falling apart.

 

Reserved addresses for anything which can't or shouldn't be dynamic, but you're likely to upgrade or replace regularly. Particularly printers, but I'd stick wireless access points here as well.

 

The idea isn't so much "make sure they always get the same IP address" as "make sure it's easy to manage" - you use the reservations to make it easier to manage upgrades, so the printer in the biology lab is always going to be 814.23.544.15. If you replace that printer, you just update the reservation with the new MAC address. Saves having to print out configuration pages to work out what the settings should be.

[SpuffMonkey]

OK - while we're on reservations and printers - I use them for my HPs - but even though I give the reservation a nice meaningful name - I always find it gets overwritten by the HP printers device name thingie - you know the NPI76576 type job. Any ideas on how to stop that?

[PiqueABoo]

I think anything that provides a service to the network should have fixed address, so that's more or less everything but workstations.

 

I'm not so interested in reservations coz I prefer to keep track of what's using what static IP in DNS where you can give them sensible names. If there are a lot of printer or switches or APs you can file them away neatly in their own zones.

[GrumbleDook]

OK - while we're on reservations and printers - I use them for my HPs - but even though I give the reservation a nice meaningful name - I always find it gets overwritten by the HP printers device name thingie - you know the NPI76576 type job. Any ideas on how to stop that?

 

Use a bigger hammer ;-)

 

Turn off Appletalk and Bonjour (formerly known as Rendezvous ... and actually known as zero-conf) as these can be a right pain in giving it a different name to the one you set.

[Ric_]

@SpuffMonkey: The NPI... business is the default IPX name.... enable IPX, change the name and then disable it again. Also use the telnet interface to change the HOST-NAME of the printer (I find that this works better than using the web interface for the task).

[PiqueABoo]

Well that worked.. why are you faffing about trying to make clunky things play nicely?

 

Give them static addresses and put your favourite names in DNS yourself.