On 04/29/2010 08:54 AM, Andrew McNabb wrote:
> It's not always that simple.  I had one time where the rogue DHCP server
> was giving out correct information for almost everything.  The only
> thing it was getting wrong was next-server, so certain machines weren't
> PXE booting correctly.  Sure, sometimes it's easy to track down a rogue
> DHCP server, but at times the effects can be incredibly subtle.

In one case on my network, the lease times offered by the rogue DHCP
server were sufficiently short that by the time I got to the office of
the user affected, the bad lease had expired and a good lease from my
server obtained.  Took me a couple of hours to track down what was
happening as blackouts rolled across my faculty offices in waves.
Sniffing also wasn't so simple to begin with as my DHCP server was on a
completely different subnet than the affected machines, so sniffing on
the dhcp server's end didn't reveal anything, other than that my server
would make an offer that was sometimes not acknowledged.

Finally when I could catch a machine with an actual bad lease I was able
to figure out what was going on, sniffed the bad dhcp mac address, and
tracked it down to a port.  Turned out someone had turned on internet
connection sharing on their windows computer, but they had accidentally
shared the wrong interface so instead of sharing their wired interface
over an adhoc wireless connection, they were sharing their wireless over
the ethernet.

So until you've actually been a network admin on a large network, don't
be so sure that things are always as easy as you think.


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