John Hanks wrote: > On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Edward Ned Harvey<[email protected]> > wrote: > >>> I know that I can tell a DHCP server that machine with MAC address >>> [bla] is to always get IP address [foo] this seems straight forward >>> but the question is, if machine with MAC address [bla] treats it's IP >>> address as statically assigned, as in, it's hardwritten into the >>> configuration/startup scripts, does that "violate" (for lack of a >>> better term) the rules of DHCP? >>> >> Absolutely no problem. I do this all the time, and here are the reasons >> why: >> > > I'm going to take the opposing viewpoint, if only to make this a more > lively discussion. > > My opinion is that the only machines in an environment that should be > set statically are the DHCP and DNS servers and, if these are > virtualized, the hosts which make up the virtualization > infrastructure. My view of a network infrastructure places DHCP and > DNS at the foundation. I took this approach in the last network I set up from scratch. I put static assignments by MAC into my DHCP server.
I found two problems with it: 1) Some system (e.g. some VMWare products, Oracle), really, don't like being installed with a DHCP address. I recall on some installations this was a warning and others absolutely refused to install with a DHCP interface. I believe that decision is outside the scope of an installer. 2) At one point I was overly enthusiastic with the copy-and-paste and ended up with duplicate MAC addresses in my DHCP assignments file. This caused a problem, but not until the next DHCP renew cycle. I since added a validator to ensure MAC uniqueness. >> If a linux machine is a dhcp client, then the linux machine will assign >> itself whatever hostname the dhcp server says. I believe this is distro specific. I'm running many Ubuntu Server configurations that do not do this. I don't have anything which requires it's own hostname in /etc/hosts so I haven't had to deal with this problem. (Well, I've got a non-production Oracle in a small cage in a VMWare virtual network, and it might require this) . FWIW -- Dewey _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
