Several DHCP Servers
I have a simple network, all on one subnet (192.168.64.?). The main router has two wireless routers connected to it.
Normally I'd leave the dhcp servers of the two wireless routers off, and the main router assigns addresses 100 to 150. Does it hurt anything to say, instead have all three routers with their DHCP servers turned on, and have them spread the range out? E.g. main router assigns from 50-100, wireless router 1 from 101-150, wireless router 2 from 151-200? If you turn DHCP on on the wireless router, does it block any DHCP packets from relaying through to the main router?
The reason I ask is because I want the wireless routers to gracefully not allow any more than about 10 clients to connect, and I can't do that when the IP's are handed out by the main router. I'd like the wireless routers to manage their own IP addresses for the wireless clients.
Normally I'd leave the dhcp servers of the two wireless routers off, and the main router assigns addresses 100 to 150. Does it hurt anything to say, instead have all three routers with their DHCP servers turned on, and have them spread the range out? E.g. main router assigns from 50-100, wireless router 1 from 101-150, wireless router 2 from 151-200? If you turn DHCP on on the wireless router, does it block any DHCP packets from relaying through to the main router?
The reason I ask is because I want the wireless routers to gracefully not allow any more than about 10 clients to connect, and I can't do that when the IP's are handed out by the main router. I'd like the wireless routers to manage their own IP addresses for the wireless clients.
In order for this to work you would have to create different subnets for each wireless router otherwise to DHCP servers would conflict with each other and none of your users would obtain an IP address automatically. You would want to set a static IP address of 192.168.64.xxx on each of your wireless routers and that would be their WAN address. Then allow them to supply a seperate subnet to their wireless clients that way the wireless clients could access through the WAN port your main router and subnet.
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I totally dissagree with jenkinsme, as long as you configure the ip addresses you want to lease on each device it will work a treat.
karl
karl
Karl are you sure about that? If you have a server that is giving out ip addresses and you connect a router and enable DHCP it will continually shutdown the DHCP service.
yes he is correct.. if you have multiple servers they can all run DHCP. The key is to not have the scopes overlap of you will have duplicate IP problems..
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ASKER
okay, I do appear to be running multiple dhcp servers now on the network. My laptop is getting an IP from the wireless router's DHCP server. What I'm not sure of, is if enabling the dhcp server on the wireless router will cause it to filter out and not allow dhcp broadcast packets from going through. If it does, that would be perfect, but there's no way to know until I max out the users on the wireless network. I will give that a try soon.
If it turns out they are getting through, if the wireless unit has a built in firewall you might be able to filter ports 67 and 68 and still allow other broadcasts. Whether the firewall would block those ports from its own DHCP server is another question.
ASKER
Nope, they do get through. As soon as the one dhcp server stops working, another one kicks in. The port blocking doesn't seem to be doing anything but the router's interface for that is rather confusing so I might not be doing it right.
So it looks like having several DHCP servers is not a good way to limit the number of users on a particular network device. Seems like having more than one dhcp server is actually pretty useless unless you need the redundancy.
So it looks like having several DHCP servers is not a good way to limit the number of users on a particular network device. Seems like having more than one dhcp server is actually pretty useless unless you need the redundancy.