How many times have you found yourself restoring a server which happens to be the DHCP server, and the leases start expiring? Suddenly, it goes from one server being down, to the entire network being down.

I find that when fixing problems with servers during business hours, the users will often be quite content to leave me be, as long as they can surf the web while I work. Sometimes they cannot do this becase the server is also the DNS server.

It’s not worth the time to set up a temporary DHCP server, right?

Wrong.

There is an open source project called Dual DHCP DNS Server. It’s free, it’s powerful, and it is very quick and easy to set up. Assign a static IP address to any workstation, download and install this, adjust a few lines in the INI file, and you’re off and running. the installation takes only a few seconds. At the end, without a reboot, it (optionally) starts the service.

You just need to edit the DualServer.ini file, and edit a few lines. The most important ones for a simple setup are:

[DHCP-RANGE]
DHCP_Range=192.168.2.100-192.168.2.199
Subnet_Mask=255.255.255.0
DNS_Server=4.2.2.2
Router=192.168.2.1
Lease_Time=1000

Override the default settings and adjust them for your network, (re)start the service, and you’re good to go.

Of course there are plenty of options in there, and you can get as complex as you want with this utility – but if you’re like me, you’d rather do that with a fancy GUI DHCP server built into Windows. For a free quick-start simple DHCP server though, this is the ticket.

Tags: dhcp, free