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DHCP Problems

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by timothy.sharpe

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We are having a DHCP problem. We have a main office with for regional offices. The PDC in the home office and the BDC in the regional offices are all NT 4 with SP6a. All workstations are windows 2000 with SP3. All offices are using DHCP and have been running fine for over a year. Problems started last week in one office and then a second office yesterday. The clients started getting IP addresses that started with 169.254.120, this happened in both offices and that is not our IP range and I haveno idea where it is coming from. If I do a IPCONFIG /RELAESE on the workstation I get a message ?the ip address for the tcpip adapter cannot be released. This happened on 10 workstations. The only resolution that worked was to uninstall DHCP Server on the server, reboot, re-add DHCP Server and reconfigure the scope. When I did this the workstations were again able to obtain valid IP addresses. The only commonality is that we started rolling out OkiData printers. I have never heard of a printer acting as a DHCP Server, but then again I have no idea what is happening.

3 replies

by matt_s

Sounds like your DHCP server choked for some reason. The 169.x.x.x address range is what windoze defaults to when it can't find a DHCP server. Most likely, stopping and restarting the DHCP service or rebooting the server would have fixed the problem.

As for the reason you DHCP server quit working, it's hard to say. Someone may have been messing around, or any number of things. When all else fails, blame it on microsoft...... I don't think it had anything to do with the printers, but I suppose it's possible one of the printers had the same IP as your server which would cause problems.

by timothy.sharpe

Thanks. I really did not think it was the printer. I did not know that 169.xx was the default if DHCP services could not be located, that is good to know. Stpping and restarting the servive would be much easier than uninstalling / reinstalling the services.

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