Testing Win2003 DHCP with an established Novell DHCP 1

[spelk]

I'm coming at Windows Networking with Windows 2003 Server (Standard edition) as a bit of a newbie, please forgive my inexperience. I'm trying to learn and test a small domain with about 80-100 users.

We currently run a Novell Network, and I've sort nof inherited the running of it, without much in the way of novell training, however I have soldiered on - but it is time we shifted our focus to a Windows 2003 Server setup with Active Directory, and my vision is to build it from scratch. Anyway, I'm currently trying to test out a situation where I have a Windows 2003 Server, and one or two clients - just so I can become familiar with the basics really.

Does anyone know if its possible to test out the DHCP capability of the Windows Server, alongside a Novell Netware DHCP server serving IP addresses to the workplace, without disrupting out current users?

We are connected to the Internet via a link to an academic institution on the UK SuperJANET network, so our IP addresses are all under a subdomain of a UK University eg. xyz.uni.ac.uk, and our range is in the form of x.x.x.1 to x.x.x.85

The Novell DHCP is dishing out x.x.x.1 to x.x.x.x80, and I initially set up the Windows Server DHCP to dish out x.x.x.81 to x.x.x.84 with the Windows Server being on x.x.x.85

But after authorising the Win2003 DHCP server and scope, some of our users were being served DHCP requests from the Win2003 machine, and my test Windows clients were grabbing their IP addresses from the Novell DHCP range. Is there a way to make a client take an IP from a specific DHCP server? Is the only way to use Reserved static IP addresses attached to MAC addresses of the test clients?

Ultimately the Win2003 server will become our main DHCP and DNS server, along with Filesharing and Printing capabilities, but until then is there a way to test these capabilities without disrupting the current network structure in place?

Any help and advice you can give, is very much appreciated.

 

[itsp1965]

Well it seems your situation is by design. Even if you authorize a Windows 2003 DHCP server it can only stop other Windows DHCP servers from giving out addresses and not DHCP servers running on different OSses. You did right by assigning different ranges to each of your servers
If you want to stop certain devices from accessing a DHCP server you will have to use MAC address filtering.
This link explains what needs to be done;

http://www.petri.co.il/filter-mac-address-windows-server-2008-dhcp-server-callout-dll.htm

On the Novell side... well although I have administered Novell in the past, never used their DHCP services so I don't know how you setup MAC address filtering.

HTH

 

[spelk]

Thanks for your answer, I realise its a somewhat artificial environment I've set up to do some testing, and I've now sorted it, so that my W2003 DHCP server is only assigning reserved IP addresses to my test machines by MAC address. At least this way I can run and configure the service and still have it operational side by side with our Novell live setup.

 

[cajuntank]

You could move your DHCP entirely over to Windows if you like. The only thing you'll need to do is setup option 78 and possibly 79 (you'd actually have to create and define these options) as scope options to hand out to your clients so they get SLP information correctly. Assuming your running a Netware 5 or greater, that is.

Having said that, I would only do this if your in the process of migrating away from Novell to Microsoft. Reason being is that there are numerous performance querks with XP browsing to network drives. You might experience a few seconds of delay accessing mapped drives or UNC paths the first time you double click where you could access quickly before. There are numerous troubleshooting tips out there to try to fix, but I've never had too much luck, so I only make the transition when I'm pretty close to migrating over completely.