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This Summer, I will be installing a new server at a large middle school which is currently transitioning into a secondary school. Can anyone offer me some advice on what I should be including in the setup? I will have two host servers to play with. Both will run Server 2012R2 with Hyper-V VMs. My initial thoughts as to how to divide the roles needed are as follows: [TABLE=class: outer_border, width: 500, align: center] [TR] [TD]Host 01[/TD] [TD]vDC 01: AD, DHCP, DNS, DFS etc[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]vUTL 01: WDS/MDT, WSUS[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Host 02[/TD] [TD]vDC 02: Secondary Domain controller [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]vUTL 02: Sophos, Printers[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Host 01 will be the new server with 64GB RAM. Host 02 will be the current server, rebuilt from 2008R2 to 2012R2 and 24GB RAM. My initial thoughts are that I should be configuring DHCP failover. Are there any other redundancy features I should be building into the system? Or even any additional features that, whilst not necessarily offering redundancy, offer extra functionality to the domain? I also have two NAS devices to hold some form of backup. I was thinking of using the free version of Veeam to backup VMs (subject to storage space) to one NAS and then use the existing Macrium Reflect software they have to backup data to the other.

Hi Everyone, I am looking to migrate our schools DNS and DHCP over the summer holidays - I did think about hosting these on their firewall, but I would like access if needed. I am looking at purchasing a Micro computer/server to host these services on, maybe something like this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-Optiplex-Desktop-Computer-D10U001/dp/B08SMSFV7R/ref=sr_1_3?crid=31HTKAIGS3BV6&keywords=dell+micro+pc&qid=1688402474&sprefix=dell+micro+pc%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-3 Can anyone see any downsides to this? It will only be used for these two services, and nothing else. TIA.

So I am currently in a battle of an affordable serverless solution for schools, that will happily run with Google Workspace or M365. Azure AD, Teams, OneDrive, Intune, Google Drive etc... Printing solution: Printix or Papercut Hive, although apparently Printix teachers can not release student prints from a photocopier or PC? Apparently? My real issue is DHCP/DNS Services.... Now I dont see a need for a local DNS in a standard primary school unless their is a specific piece of hardware or software that requires it. Which leaves me with DHCP..... I have had several ideas.... a couple of schools have nice Meraki L3 switches thanks to Connect the Classroom project, others are running a standard HP Switch managed switch (some L3 some not) however the DHCP on HP Switches I am far from impressed with. The schools feed is provided by our local county and sits behind a central firewall and filtering is provided centrally from the provider. I have thought about Unifi Dream Machine Pro, Intel NUC running Linux etc.... what are people using out there in the world?

Hi All, We have an issue with our Smoothwall UTM - We recently set up a VLAN for our guest wireless using the DHCP of the Smoothwall box - It works fine, except when you try to access internal resources (The school website, our exchange server etc) I tried setting up some exceptions but nothing seemed to work. Any ideas anyone? Something obvious I'm missing?

Okay so but of a noob to all of this so please bare this in mind. The ICT department of the school I work at has requested Raspberry Pi. What they want is a Pi Net server PC built and in the corner of their department. It will dish out an IP address and an operating system over the internet and students can do projects. This wants to be done so that when a Pi is turned off it will lose all the data and reset as if brand new ready for the next student. Working from operating systems on SD cards would be too hard to keep track of. This being said if the Pi Net server is configured to dish out IP's, I'm concerned that it will dish them out all over the school so I'm trying to think of a way to contain the IP's and Pi. Am I asking for the impossible?

Hi All, Just a quick question (hopefully!) On my network we have one DHCP server; the ip address starts at 192.168.0.1 and ends at 192.168.1.254 with a subnet mask of 255.255.254.0. Any machine that connects with an ip address in the 192.168.0. range can connect to the internet with no problems, however any machine that is assigned an ip in the 192.168.1. range cannot access the internet at all. I cannot ping 8.8.8.8 or bbc.co.uk or even perform a tracert. I can however ping the router at 192.168.1.254. I have spoken to the internet providers and they have assured me that the router is set to the same 255.255.254.0 range. Any advice would be much appreciated as we are constantly running our of room on the DHCP Scope. cheers guys!!

Hello, I have one DHCP on one LAN and I want to create two scopes, one for the users PCs and one for the Virtual Machines. The question is how do I make the DHCP server "know" what IPs to offer to the users and what to the VMs??? Keep in mind that the server is 2003, because for 2008 I have found a patch. Thank you very much for any help! VLSNOW

I just inherited a fairly medium-sized network (>500 workstations) on one broadcast domain. I plan to split this up into smaller subnets for better control and performance. The Windows 2008 R2 AD with 2 domain controllers is the least of my problem but what is bothering me is the lack of redundancy for the DHCP service which is really a major component. Other than putting the DHCP service in a 2008 cluster, what other methods are available to create a reliable DHCP service for a routed network?

I'm reconfiguring my Nagios box as I move it over to a VM. I want to add DHCP monitoring but I can't quite get my head around it. I have 1 DHCP server (a Server 2003 box). I also have a WDS server - WDS makes this act as a DHCP proxy. What I'm trying to figure out is this.... should I always receive my DHCP offer from the WDS box (as it appears from manually running check_dhcp) or will I sometimes get a lease from the DHCP server? Also, how should I set up the dependencies? It's far too early to be thinking about this stuff!

How do I install DHCP to a Ubuntu Server I have a Ubuntu server which I am playing with to get used to the os I also have installed a gui to it. How do I install and configure DCHP to my ubuntu server using the GUI?

Morning All, Hope you are enjoying your holidays or are you at work like me? My Main Task over the holidays is to set 5 IT Rooms with static IP's, whats the best way of doing this? I was thinking to reserve a set of IP's in DHCP such as 12.50.198.1 - 12.50.198.100 for example. Would the best way be to manually set the static IP's on the machines once they have been reserved. Thanks

Hi All, I've inherited a split scope DHCP from my predecessor, which looks like a complete nightmare to unpick, I basically need to decommission a DC and put a new one in place, at the moment DC2 handles some of the DHCP and so does DC1, looking at the ranges and there is so much there very hard to work out which DC is handling which range unless I go into it manually to see what's excluded on one compared to the other, There's at least 60 + scopes split across both. Does anyone know of a quick way of moving this all over. Or a safe way of doing this, I discovered this over Easter holidays! only my 3rd week so I'm discovering many things that i want to fix! I basically want failover DHCP across the 2 servers which I have seen much more than this Thanks everyone

Hi all, is anyone any good with DNS/DHCP. Our DHCP server was showing as out of IP addresses. In the scope there were 60 excluded IP addresses which weren't being used for anything anymore so I edited the exclusions to include those 60 addresses. That looked like it was working and two new devices appeared in DHCP but I was then getting the error Forward record registration for IPV4 addresses and FQDN failed with error 9017 (DNS bad key). After reading some help guides online I changed the option on the scope to Always dynamically update DNS records. After I restarted the scope I'm now getting the message DHCP scope is out of addresses despite adding some earlier and those IP addresses haven't been allocated. Tried deleting one PC's DNS records but when you try to get it to pick up and IP address the PC says unable to contact your DHCP server. Anyone any ideas?

Hi All, I've installed and deployed Windows Server 2003 x64 R2 SP2 AD domain controller with GC and Windows 2000 Domain Functionality level, In this server I run DNS and DHCP services, everything works out well but somehow when some of the client got new IP address the DNS entries is not cleaned / updated in the AD Integrated DNS service console, therefore this caused problem when i try to remote desktop into a certain PC, and also problem when the non windows VM (Linux) got assigned through DHCP, it will be associated with wrong name. Can anyone provide assistance in this matter please ? Thanks.

Hi everyone. Recently I made a post about my attempts to set-up our school’s network to be available over the CLEO VPN system. After the initial problems I was able to get the RADIUS functionality to work and so I can now authenticate with my username and password whilst using a home connection. However, I have run into another bit of confusion and I was hoping someone would be able to help. I have never used a VPN before so I’m not sure what to expect, but when I connect I get an IP address within the 10.x.x.x range like the one issued to our internet connection from CLEO. The problem is that all of our servers work on the 172.16.x.x range. If I am understanding things correctly, when I set up Routing and Remote Access I set my networks DHCP Relay Agent to that of my DHCP server. Is this supposed to act as a bridge to forward requests between the address I receive and that of my network? If so, I am unable to access resources by name of IP. I have found an article on here about the use of Proxy ARP. Is this something I need to configure, and if so where is it? Thanks guys for your continued help with this. I’m under some pressure from the senior staff to get this thing up and running whilst still trying to learn and understand what I’m doing on the fly. Cheers.

Because of the unique way our network is setup I need to disable DHCP in Xubuntu. I'm finding if I set the DNS server manualy it's dumps the setting I give it and goes back to the one the DHCP server dishes out. Thanks

Hi All, I've recently had our firewall moved over from Sonicwall to Smoothwall and our BYOD Wireless has stopped working and I'm after some advice. Smoothwall is acting as a DHCP server for the BYOD VLANS (MAT). When the device connects through the Smoothwall RADIUS (Authenticates fine). The Device asks for an IP address, Smoothwall then assigns it an IP address, then the device asks again for an IP Address...Then it just loops and then eventually times out. It's like the end device is not accepting the IP address it has been given. I've tried setting a static IP address and no luck either. Ruckus are adamant everything is working fine on their end and so is Smoothwall but I can't find what the issue is with the devices not accepting the IP address...Any ideas will be hugely grateful as I'm pulling my hair out with this one! Thanks

Hi, Our network is running Windows and macOS clients all of which are joined to Active Directory. The Macs are all running Windows via Bootcamp. We were having issues which were being caused by our macOS clients because they were not registering PTR records. We were also having issues with stale records. I spent a lot of time researching DNS and DHCP configuration to try to resolve these problems and ended up thinking I had solved it with the following configuration. But I have now realised that we still have problems which I will explain after the configuration. Servers 2 x Windows Server 2016 VM's Both Domain Controlers Both running DNS Both running DHCP DHCP Config Failover mode: Load balance Enable DNS dynamic updates: Always dynamically update DNS records Discard A and PTR records when lease is deleted: Enabled Dynamically update DNS records for DHCP clients that do not request updates: Enabled Disable dynamic updates for DNS PTR Records: Disabled DHCP name protection: Disabled Lease duration: 2 days Dynamic DNS credentials are configured. Account is only a Domain User DNS Config Active Directory Integrated Zones Dynamic updates: Secure only Replication: All domain controllers in this domain No-refresh interval: 1 days Refresh interval: 1 days Scavenging period: 3 days Group Policy Computer\Administrative Templates\Network\DNS Client\Dynamic update: Set to Disabled Current Problems My aim was to get the DHCP servers to handle all DNS registration to solve the problem of macOS not registering PTR records. The PTR records are now being created but it looks like the macs are still creating their own A records as the permissions list the client instead of the DNS registration user. The macs obviously use the same ethernet or wireless card in macOS and Windows so the MAC address won't change. I assume when each OS requests an IP it will be given the same IP due to the MAC address and the DHCP server will update the client name. I'm not sure about DNS though; Will the DHCP server create a new A record because the client name is different? resulting in duplicate records for a single IP; OR will the the DHCP server try to change the client name on the A record with the matching IP in which case it will fail if the mac has already registered its own record. I don't know if/how I can tell the mac to let the DHCP server register the records for it (Our mac technician decided to pursue a different career path leaving us Windows tech's scratching our heads ). The second problem I'm having is that for some reason even the Windows clients aren't always registering correctly. I have a Windows only device which has received an IP from DHCP but has no A or PTR records. This device is affected by the Group Policy mentioned above, so it would be relying on the DHCP server to register the records for it. But I can't see anything in the DHCP-Server or DNS-Server logs in Event Viewer on the our servers which relate to this client name. The third problem, albeit minor is that any clients with statically assigned IP's don't register in DNS due to the setting in Group Policy. There are only a handful of these and we occasionally assign IP's temporarily for various tasks (as DHCP clients require proxy for Internet) If I have missed any important information please ask. Any help would be greatly appreciated.