Reply to post: Re: Oh dear

Re: Oh dear

Increase the DHCP lease times if it's a problem. There's no way a DHCP-providing server should be offline for more than a week, anyway.

Static IPs have their places, but generally speaking DHCP solves more issues than it causes. First, it usually means manually entering IP and subnet. As someone who inherited very odd subnets, I can assure you that it's not fun to spend ages on a problem only to discover it was a typo in an IP/subnet.

And DHCP with long lease times, failover DHCP server (bog-standard since Server 2008), and reservations for anything you care about makes life so much easier.

Honestly, how do you deploy clients? I press F12 in the BIOS, they get a DHCP address, it goes (via PXE) into WDS, I choose a Windows image, it reboots and when it comes up it's on the domain. Whether it's brand-new out-of-the-box, or a complete re-image. From that point on the address doesn't change unless the lease expires and for some reason it can't renew the old address (i.e. never). Literally one key-press, one mouse click and you're done.

How do you do that with static addressing without having to maintain huge lists of things and manually enter stuff in places, or code it specifically in templates of some kind? And when I need to find out the IP or force a particular option, image, etc. I can do it via DHCP management.

Static for servers, yes. DNS server you really have NO choice but to be static (it's silly for your DNS IP to constantly have to change, for instance, but you could easily give that machine a reservation on DHCP). Everything else will work no differently on DHCP or static and for every far-fetched scenario you can imagine on one, there's something on the other that works to your advantage.

But I honestly don't have the time to manage hundreds of individual client IPs like that. Set up the servers. Maintain a list of their IPs. Done. Everything else, you let manage itself because it doesn't matter. Group membership, web-filtering, whatever else you can conceive should then be set up on a computer-name basis, possibly a MAC address or authentication as a user, not by IP.

And in a world of VM's, BYOD, self-building clients and managed networks, its too much faffing to be bothering with any kind of individual IP address for services. I literally know two of my IP addresses off by heart - the gateway (.1 of my subnet) and a secondary DNS server (.10). Everything else I don't need to ever know and don't know and don't care, they're all named and DNS-accessible and worst-case I could find out via the switch (which also keeps track of DNS name vs IP vs Mac) in about two clicks.

I honestly haven't typed in an IP address other than those in ages (and that is to ping them to ensure they're back up after taking them down, so that everything else I'm about to do will resolve properly). I just reserve the IP on DHCP if I need to, e.g. I made an exception for web filtering on one machine, added it to an AD group, used that group for filtering I made a port forward to a particular machine, reserve the lease on DHCP and use the computer name. I can blacklist clients on RADIUS on the basis that their MACs aren't in the right groups, etc.

About the only other thing that needs static IPs is some forms of HA failover, but even that's not all of them and they're not "usual" IT stuff. DHCP, DNS, DFS, HTTP, SMTP, etc. failover doesn't need the same IPs on every machine, for instance. Just list multiple entries and have "server1.domain.com" or equivalent.