On Tue, 7 Sep 2010, Patrick Cable wrote: > Regarding using DHCP to configure servers: > > I am of the mindset that as long as the server gets the same address > every time, I don't care how it gets configured, and if I'm going to > set up a DHCP infrastructure why not do it for everything. I believe > that even though things may never change, the ability to make things > easily changeable is something worthwhile. > > Others are of the mindset that server IPs change so infrequently that > it is not worth putting in DHCP and risky to do so. What's the benefit > if the addresses never change? > > I am looking at a network renumber in my future, so I was going to > deploy this with the renumber. > > How do you feel about DHCP used to configure server addresses? > Do you do it at your $ORGANIZATION? Was it split? Do you like it? What > do you see as values/issues with this deployment?
We do it on some servers where the drives themselves are replicated at the block level (we started where all the systems had their boot drive on EMC and EMC replicated to our DR datacenter) having the IP addresses be configured via DHCP allowed us to have the drive images be identical, but have the systems be on different networks when they boot up. Prior to doing this, we just used the same IP addresses in production and DR, but that causes significant problems for managing the other devices (firewalls, switches, etc) that did not boot from the EMC. It works if you have good people managing a decent DHCP server, we initially tried it with a windows AD server doing the DHCP and it was a fiasco. other than things like this where you have value in using the same system image, I prefer to use config management tools (i.e. puppet/cfengine type things) to set the addresses as it eliminates one more thing that can go wrong when the systems boot up. David Lang _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
