[Infrastructures] DHCP for servers

[Mark Ferlatte]

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Kyle Moore said on Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 02:01:09PM -0600:
> This is probably a stupid question but is it common or considered best=20
> practices to use DHCP for servers? I've always thought this was a bad=20
> idea because it is just one more dependency for the server that I would=
=20
> like to avoid. Now that I'm trying to automate more and maintain=20
> consistency DHCP seems like a good idea.

I'm not sure about best practice, but I use DHCP for everything on my
network that I can, which, at this point, is everything except the DHCP
server itself and the routers (and some lame network appliances that
don't speak DHCP).

I do this because I don't want to have to reconfigure all of my servers
should I have to renumber my IP range, or change my DNS servers, or use
a different upstream router.

The security concerns about DHCP are valid, but don't affect my site: we
have our own subnets with our own network gear and full control of all
hardware on site.  While it's true that someone could bring up a DHCP
server on their laptop, it hasn't been an issue in practice.  We also
use fairly long leases (5 days, usually), the idea being that the leases
get renewed generally at 50% of lease expiry, so if all of the DHCP
infrastructure goes down over a weekend everything will keep running
until Monday.

M

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