DHCP or fixed IPs for servers ????

[Fulko Hew]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Dave Ihnat <dihnat at dminet.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:28:24AM -0600, linux guy wrote:
>> I have a number of servers on our local network.  I have always set the IP
>> on my servers manually, ie disabled DHCP and assigned each one a unique
>> fixed IP.
>
> You really don't need to do that.  Just use an IP mapping scheme,
> restrict the DHCP range, and manually assign static server addresses
> from a known range.
>
>> Is there a practical way to assign an IP to a server automatically, ie with
>> DHCP and still have other computers find it on the network and have services
>> like port forwarding, firewalls, etc. work properly in routers ?
>
> Well, yes, you can reserve addresses by MAC address, use DDNS with your
> DHCP server to update DNS, but why?  Servers should always be effectively
> static; any scheme that assigns addresses to them increases complexity
> and the possibility of problems.

Ordinarily (in a perfect world) I would totally agree with those comments,
but alas, I don't live in a perfect world.

So I've found that because (in my case) the addressing, etc. is controlled
by another group, I've found it easier to get them to allocate an address
(from their pool) and have it fed to my machine via DHCP  (it sadly seems that
the world has almost forgotten that you can assign things statically!)

Then I can also allow them to feed me the correct domain and DNS resovler
information, etc. (so that I can behave and operate nicely within
their network).
I have them feed me this info, because otherwise, when _they_ change the
network, I'd never know... until _after_ I found out something was broken.

Having said that... I still had to implement the address as static and I had to
turn on my own 'bind' for DNS resolution, etc. because a lot of the information
they provided by DHCP was still incorrect.  But that was the idea.