(And, see previous paragraph, this can be located on another site.) If you happen to have a PC lying around that can be left 'always on'). (And it will run on a desktop OS if costs are an issue. You can get away with something like TFTPD32 which is free, easy to setup and will do collision detect as well. For up to about 200 users you don't really need a big Windows server or a Linux box. If all else fails you will have to setup a separate DHCP server. If you have another DHCP server (Windows/Linux or another router) on your WAN that is able to do collision detect you may consider adding this LAN as an additional DHCP scope there and reconfigure the site-router to forward DHCP to this one. Of course: Someone has to maintain that reservation list. The reserved addresses will not be subject to collisions. If the DHCP scope is large enough for all computers on-site and the majority of those computers is fixed on-site it may be feasible to assign the regular systems a fixed ip-address through DHCP reservation, leaving only a very small pool of dynamically assigned addresses for guests and/or laptops that are infrequent in the office. Doing it every 5 minutes may be quite noticable to the users.

Outlook2003 is notorious for this, 2007 seems better behaved). In my experience many network-programs don't really like it the computer re-acquires DHCP while the program is running (e.g. Shorter lease-times will definitely help but are not a 100% guarantee. Your routers DHCP server implementation may be able to do 'DHCP collision detect'.Ĭheck this out and enable it if possible.

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