Whether or not to use DHCP is your choice. If some of the systems are portable, it's certainly more convenient to use DHCP to assign them IP addresses on all networks they may visit.
The D-Link and other DHCP servers offer a useful way to established a fixed IP address without having to set the address in the client. That's what assignment of an IP address based on the client's MAC address is. Each time the client requests an IP address, it gets the same one, because the DHCP server allocates the IP address based on the MAC address.
An advantage to DHCP server based address assignment is that you can make changes to the network setup such as subnet masks, IP addresses, DNS server addresses, etc., without any changes required to the client. That's true whether the assigned IP addresses are "static" (based on the client's MAC interface) or not. So all the IP network configuration is done on the DHCP server, and delivered to the clients.
Alternatively, they can all be assigned by hand at each client. As I said, the choice is yours to make.
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
July 27th, 2004 16:00
The D-Link and other DHCP servers offer a useful way to established a fixed IP address without having to set the address in the client. That's what assignment of an IP address based on the client's MAC address is. Each time the client requests an IP address, it gets the same one, because the DHCP server allocates the IP address based on the MAC address.
An advantage to DHCP server based address assignment is that you can make changes to the network setup such as subnet masks, IP addresses, DNS server addresses, etc., without any changes required to the client. That's true whether the assigned IP addresses are "static" (based on the client's MAC interface) or not. So all the IP network configuration is done on the DHCP server, and delivered to the clients.
Alternatively, they can all be assigned by hand at each client. As I said, the choice is yours to make.
Jim