Where have all the ip's gone?

[JohnConnolly]

Not a title for a song but a wierd problem...
We have two Win2003 Servers, let's call them my_server and his_server. They are on the same physical lan but different subnets and domains although each server has a secondary ip address on the other server's subnet (just to make it easy to run a reciprocal data backup system. I don't use dynamic ip's so my_server doesn't run DHCP. He uses mostly static ip's plus dynamic for visitors with portables so his_server does run DHCP. This morning someone tried to connect a portable but couldn't get an ip. Checking his_server showed that my_server had taken them all. Why would it do this? How? How can I stop it doing it???

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Have you setup VPN? I've seen this happen when setting up Remote Access to allow incoming VPN connections.

 

[JohnConnolly]

Well the VPN service is installed but I don't use it. I'll remove it and see if that fixes it. Might take a while to know as it doesn't happen all the time...

 

[porkchopexpress]

Usually the VPN service contacts the DHCP server and reserves blocks of IP addresses usually 10 at a time so as lwcomputing says this could be the problem.