Network issue or DHCP issue?

[DrB0b]

Hello all,
Running a single DHCP server for a network of about 50 devices. Not all are DHCP but most are. The last couple of weeks, one PC a day would get an IP address conflict issue but I could never find out what machine is actually conflicting with it. This continued to happen to almost 10 separate PCs on the network. Any thoughts on where to start looking to see what is going on?

A little history of the network. Had a split 10.0.0.1 - 10.0.0.128 and 129 - 255 on two 08 servers. One went down so I set the current server to the entire scope and ran for a couple weeks until I had the other server back up. Once I got the other server back up, I powered on and disabled its DHCP service and was messing with software. After a restart, I forgot that the service came back on line and was active, possibly confusing some PCs for a couple days until I shut it off again. Is it possible that this was causing the above issues? The IP conflict still happened to a couple PCs a couple days after I shut off the service on the 2nd DHCP server though.

Sorry if the above is confusing. It is Tuesday and I am extremely sleepy......

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[baddos]

Anything is possible, but I would enable ip address conflict resolution on your DHCP server.

For Microsoft DHCP server, you would go into the properties for the server and on the advanced tab put a number greater than 0 for "conflict detection attemps". I personally run with 2 for my servers. This will have the server ping an IP address before it leases it out to ensure that there isn't a client out there with that address.