DHCP reservations
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Hi guys,
I've recently started working for a small web development company that has pfSense running as their primary gateway. The old administrator set up DHCP on a windows server saying it was "easier" to do. Since I'm a big fan of pfSense I decided that having another server do the DHCP was not a good idea so I switched.
After doing so many complained saying they can't get stuff where they used to, so I ended up having to create multiple pools because pfSense wouldn't let me set up a static map within the main pool. I have read https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Why_can't_I_have_static_mappings_inside_my_DHCP_range and understand the reasoning behind that, but I have a question. Since ISC DHCPD doesn't treat mappings as reservations, why not switch to another DHCP server like the OpenBSD DHCP daemon (net/dhcpd)? I'd like to rebuild the setup from scratch and upgrade to the latest version (they are currently running 2.1) so having to reconfigure all those pools would be very inconvenient.
Since all other DHCP servers work this way and I have seen some threads from users who would like pfSense to do the same, why not switch the DHCP server?
Please pardon my ignorance if my suggestion sounds stupid.
Thanks for the wonderful work you've been doing over the years, the main reason I've wanted an SBC for the past 10 years was pfSense, and I have finally bought a Netgate to run pfSense at home :)
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Is this shop a windows shop using microsoft domains? Then yeah it is much easier to let windows that they are paying for already anyway be the dhcp server which can help keep the dns that AD runs on updated, etc.
If your running a windows shop, dhcp and dns it makes way more sense to just let your windows run those 2 networking services. Pfsense sure can firewall and route providing dns/dhcp really make no sense when you have other boxes that can do it..
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Thanks johnpoz,
Nope it's a Drupal development house. All their servers are Linux, I've already moved the main ones to FreeBSD which made my life MUCH easier.
They have 2 Windows servers, One for the attendance system running Windows 7 and the other is Windows 2003 with SharePoint. They do not have an AD domain and they use SharePoint as a central file storage which I plan on replacing with OwnCloud since the machines running Windows are more than 7 years old. The attendance system is running on an old HP workstation with no backups :'(
The previous admin just decided it would be easier for him to switch from the pfSense DHCP to Windows DHCP even though it doesn't make sense to me, and to make matters worse, he had a standalone virtual server that handles the internal domains with a script, which kept breaking. I just told dnsmasq to forward everything.localdomain to the development server which solved this issue completely
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I just thought of something.
Why not add another DHCP server as a package, this way the basic configuration wouldn't change, but those who want the option would have it?