Planning for maintenance on a DHCP server.

[David Hayling]

I'm looking for some advice prior to carrying out planned maintenance. I
am running a DHCP server (ver 2.10p) on a INW4.11 box patched to iwsp5b.
It is serving fully dynamic addresses to several hundred PC's and Macs
on two connected subnets. The hard disks are not in a RAID array. I need
to change one of the hard disks, before it fails, it is currently
sounding a little rough at the moment.

Can anyone advise me how best to carry out such a maintenance operation
with regards to providing a DHCP service. I'm quite happy with the
various TIDs from Novell about hardware maintenance in INW4.11
environment. What I am looking for is advice on how to maintain a DHCP
service.

Should I unload DHCP from the current box, copy the dhcp tab file over
to an alternative box and bring up a dhcp server on this? Or should I
bring an entirely new dhcp server into action and get it serving
addresses (a different set of addresses) for some while before bringing
the main one down? Currently the lease time for the addresses is four
days.

Thanks in advance.
David

---------------------------------
David Hayling
Network Manager
Wye College, University of London
email: d.ha...@wye.ac.uk
---------------------------------

[Daryl Maunder]

On Saturday, May 08, 1999 12:26 AM, David Hayling [SMTP:d.ha...@WYE.AC.UK]
wrote:

> I'm looking for some advice prior to carrying out planned maintenance. I
> am running a DHCP server (ver 2.10p) on a INW4.11 box patched to iwsp5b.
> It is serving fully dynamic addresses to several hundred PC's and Macs
> on two connected subnets. The hard disks are not in a RAID array. I need
> to change one of the hard disks, before it fails, it is currently
> sounding a little rough at the moment.

> Should I unload DHCP from the current box, copy the dhcp tab file over
> to an alternative box and bring up a dhcp server on this? Or should I
> bring an entirely new dhcp server into action and get it serving
> addresses (a different set of addresses) for some while before bringing
> the main one down? Currently the lease time for the addresses is four
> days.

Unload DHCPSRVR and DHCPIO on both machines, and copy the DHCPTAB file is the
way to go.

DM