Samba setup assistance

[Joseph Sinclair]

I've always used this approach where possible as well.  It's not so much about wanting to shuffle servers around, although I did use this technique to transfer a small corporate network from a class-C to a subnet of the private class-A (10.x.x.x) once.  It's about being able to accommodate changes to infrastructure, such as a DNS server change, new firewalls, VLAN changes, etc...
When DHCP is used for all systems, then things like DNS addresses and default gateways are provided by DHCP, and needn't be hand-configured on every machine, allowing them to change without breaking the whole infrastructure.  I know at least one mega-corporation that uses universal DHCP for exactly this reason, so they can modify infrastructure and reorganize subnets without having to touch each of several thousand servers.
I know there are other tools available to help with this in a Linux and/or Unix environment, but it's not so easy if over 80% of your servers are running Windows (common in large corporations)...

==Joseph++

Eric "Shubes" wrote:
>>
>> This brings up a completely unrelated, but funny story.  I once had a
>> client
>> who was a "datacenter" manager overseeing a few dozen corporate
>> servers.  He
>> insisted on using DHCP addressing for his servers over my objections.
>>
>> He argued (quite persuasively) that he would rather use DHCP reservations
>> and type the MAC addresses into a central DHCP server instead of touching
>> each server to type in it's static address.  That way if he ever
>> needed to
>> change addressing on a server or group of servers, he could simply do it
>> from the DHCP scope and renew the effected leases immediately.
> 
> That's how I do it. Dish out static addresses from DHCP. Everything's in
> one place that way. Of course, once you change the the server's address,
> other things tend to break. Ask him if he's ever actually changed server
> addresses that way. ;)
> 
>> Hmm.  I still speak with him occasionally and we continue to argue over
>> this.  :-)
>>
>> ...Kevin