Re: [WinMac] DHCP: to be or not to be?

Tim Scoff(casper[at]nb.net)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 00:50:53 -0500

>Hi all,
>
>My university is slowly shifting to DHCP from static IPs at the behest of
>our support staff. I can accept that life is easier for them (or they think
>it will be) under DHCP, but what's in it for us users?
>
>We have the usual 10baseT TCP/IP network with multiple subnets and mixed
>Mac and PC platforms. Servers are NT, Novell and Unix.
>
>From my reading of this and other lists, I foresee problems for users. I'm
>particularly concerned about Mac users (of which I am one). So do we (PC
>and Mac users) gain or lose by this change? All informed opinions and
>experiences are welcome as I'd like to garner views from all sides of the
>issue.

        Actually end users can gain just as much as the support staff
gains with a DHCP environment.

        First, they don't have to visit every computer when the IP
addresses of the DNS servers change. That means that when one of
them dies and an emergency replacement is installed the support staff
can change the settings on the DHCP server and every computer using
the DHCP server will have the correct DNS server addresses.

        Second, if you have a laptop and the university has multiple
subnets you can take it to any room with an active network port and
plug it in and have all of it's settings automatically configured for
the subnet that you are on. This is something that is starting to
happen where I work and to date our solution has been to configure
many laptops with two static IP addresses which doesn't always work
perfectly. DHCP is a much smoother solution for the end user, and if
it's implemented properly you won't notice when you go from one
subnet to another, everything will just work.

        Third, you don't have to trust the support staff to type in
the correct IP setup information into your computer when they set
things up, or you don't have to worry about typing in the correct
information if you do that yourself. This is very important when you
are dealing with a couple of hundred computers or more. Anyone can
make a simple typing mistake, and if you do something too many times
it is more and more likely for a mistake like that to happen.

        The biggest benefit for the support staff is the ease of
tracking IP addresses with a DHCP setup. If you have static IP
addresses someone has to track every single IP address and manually
update a database somewhere every time something changes. That is a
lot of work, and where I work it wasn't taken care of very well in
the past. Right now we are in a situation where I just did a manual
inventory of every computer that my department has. We are assuming
that I got all but 5 - 10 of the computers and that we'll find those
computers over the next few months when we hand out the IP addresses
that we think aren't in use and get IP conflicts. What that means is
we're going to find the rest of them when the networking group turns
off the port that the unregistered computer is plugged into. What
has happened in the past was new IP addresses were handed out to
anyone who asked for them. Now we don't have any more so we have to
find the ones that were given to computers that are no longer on the
network so we can re-use them.
        This is also a huge benefit for you as an end user. Quite
simply with DHCP you don't have to worry about someone stealing your
IP address and kicking you off the network by mistake. Without DHCP
that is a very real possibility.

Tim Scoff, MCSE
casper@nb.net
<http://www.nb.net/~casper/>

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