[WinMac] Re: DHCP

Alex Dearden(pata[at]tampabay.rr.com)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 23:54:16 -0500

> 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.

DHCP can be very beneficial when setup properly.

However, for Windoze (and *nix) users, be very careful of your HOSTS
file. If you had some mappings in there when you were using static IPs
make sure you delete them, or better yet, delete the whole hosts file
since the machines will first look in the host files for name to IP
address resolution and then everywhere else. This can result in a lot of
headscratching (and maybe some hair-pulling) when you go to DHCP.

On the Macs you don't have that problem because, even though the Macs can
use a hosts file, unfortunately, the entries have to be Fully Qualified
Domain Names (FQDNs) and HAVE to be in a DNS server, in other words they
have to be true A Records or CNAME records.

Alex Dearden
pata@doglover.com

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Apr 12 1999 - 21:58:22 PDT