DHCP for Windows 2000

DHCP Client Needs

Before creating any scopes, an administrator must first determine the needs of the DHCP clients the scope will be servicing.

Besides receiving an IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway from a DHCP server, DHCP clients can receive DHCP options that supply many different configuration parameters. Deciding which DHCP options to include can be determined by asking the following questions:

• Which DHCP options do DHCP clients in this scope require?

• What DHCP clients are in use on the network?

• Which DHCP options do the DHCP clients support?

Determining which options are required is relatively simple, unless there are applications in use that have special needs. Besides determining which options to use, an administrator must determine the values of those options as well. For example, an administrator wants the DHCP clients to receive DNS server addresses. For load balancing, each subnet has a different secondary DNS server to service client requests. In this case, the administrator must supply the correct IP address for each subnet’s DNS server.

Next, an administrator must determine which DHCP clients are in use on the network. Since Microsoft operating systems are the most prevalent on most corporate desktops and laptops, it can pretty much be said that almost every network includes some Microsoft DHCP clients.

But there may be other types of DHCP clients as well, such as Unix, Linux, or Macintosh. Although these operating systems can all be DHCP clients, their implementations ...