On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Friedrich Harasleben wrote:
> A) BOOTP/DHCP:
> Now we are planing to upgrade from WfW 3.11 to NT and talking about which
> form of IP configuration we should use:

It depends on what functionality you're accustomed to:

> 1) local IP assignment (where does NT hide the IP address)?

Traditional, less flexible. Same old problems.

> 2) BOOTP (which is also supported now by the HP3000)

Difficult to shoehorn onto MS OSs, and DHCP can replace it completely.

> 3) DHCP (AFAIK currently not supported by the HP3000) - we would use the
> DHCP server which came with INTRANETWARE

Native to Win platform. IMHO, the most efficient way of doing it, but there are
a few caveats:
        1) Stick to NT DHCP servers for now. There are some implementations
        on several OSes which work well when you've got *no* NT servers. In
        some time there will be better solutions on other OSes.

        Maybe I'm mistaken because I haven't seen any good DHCP ports lately.
        Probably someone on the list knows the status of the ports for *nix and
        MPE.

        2) DHCP is great for all the hostmaster work: Simply define a DHCP
        address block and set defaults for the parms on that block (domain
        name, DNS server, default gateway, WINS server, syslog server, etc.).

        The server will keep tabs on address delegation and of setting *all*
        parameters on the client (except the hostname on Win machines, a
        limitation due to how different protocols boot on these OSes.
        This limitation might be overcome in NT 5.0).

        *BUT* If you're accustomed to having the IP address stick to a host,
        you'll need to use the BOOTP technique of reserving an IP address for
        the MAC address. (Though it still beats bootp because you can set more
        IP parms than you can traditionally with bootp, especially those
        specific to Win machines, such as the WINS server address).

        3) DHCP is (will become?) an IETF standard, and will conceivably be
        supported on all OSes eventually (HP-UX already has a DHCP server)

        3) On NT 4.0, the DHCP, WINS and DNS servers cooperate beautifully
        (more on this below).

> B) HOSTS file:
>
> Second issue - up to now we used a HOSTS file for server address
> resolution (situated on the server an therefor easy to administrate -
> THANKS to WRQ). MS TCP/IP does not allow a centralized version but needs
> it locally. Is there a way to facilitate the administration?

Go for DNS.

If you use dynamic IP address delegation with DHCP, then you'll *have* to set
up your primary DNS server on the NT machine running the DHCP server.  That
way, when a Win client boots with a dynamic IP address, the DNS server is aware
of it and changes its tables accordingly.

The problem with the NT primary master is that there are issues with refreshing
the zone data on non-NT secondary DNS servers (NT extends the record types, and
the traditional secondary-refresh mechanism does not adapt very well to a
dynamic IP address delegation scheme like DHCP).

With a careful setup, DHCP witn NT nameservers is a good alternative for a
centrally managed name/address-space setup in a Win95/NT client - NT server
shop with other OSes as servers, as long as all the servers *do*not* use DHCP
for address assignment (DHCP is OK for Win NT peer-to-peer servers).

Cheers...                       Marco Zamora