[Infrastructures] DHCP for servers

[Rainer.Heilke@atcoitek.com]

Sorry, either I'm tired, or you need food. :-)

Are you saying that DHCP is generally not as useful, because the effort
going in to reconfigure it is just as much--or close to--as just
regenerating static DNS? If so, I would tend to agree. I'm not sure why
the people I know use DHCP, considering the large numbers of
reservations they need/use, but since I'm not in that world, I can't
really argue from their side. I guess that, for initial deployment of a
new server when you have a whole pile, if you forget to ensure that the
IP you want to use is free before assigning it, DHCP saves you some
potential embarrassment. Beyond that, I don't see the point in a server
infrastructure. Let DHCP do what it's good at (laptops, etc.), and do
regular DNS where it makes sense.

Or am I just babbling old-school nonsense? I come from the Unix world;
maybe in Windows, DHCP makes more sense.

If that is not what you were trying to say, then please clarify.

Rainer

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Hagerty [mailto:hag@linnaean.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 2:29 PM
> To: Heilke, Rainer; infrastructures@terraluna.org
> Subject: RE: [Infrastructures] DHCP for servers
> 
> 
>     bah, lean on send key while still working.  time to get lunch :)
> 
>  >     For better or worse, there are lots of things out 
> there that don't
>  > play nicely with DHCP, and will not until DHCP is made 
> into something
>  > else (e.g. web farms using IP based vhosting, or many 
> other examples).
>  >
>  >   Sooner or later, you
>  > have the problem where you have to start writing down 
> information that
>  > is actually volatile.
> 
>     To finish the thought...  I've found that the problem of writing
> down this information is pretty general, and you can get a lot of
> traction by building things that deal with regenerate the dependant
> data as needed.  So, in the example case of DHCP and DNS, the dynamic
> DNS portion doesn't matter as much if you're already generating your
> DHCP and DNS files in the first place.  Dynamic DNS is still useful,
> but has fewer use cases that actually require it (it strikes me as
> being good for laptops; not so good if what you're really talking
> about is static: if you already have to regenerate your DHCP and DNS
> configs to reconfigure your network anyway, why take half measures in
> the generation?).
>