Can I run two DHCP servers

[dudenhymer]

I'm not extremly network saavy but I know enough to be dangerous. Here is my situation. My wife works at an animal hospital and wants me to set them up for a Cable modem shared throughout the office. They already have a windows 2000 server acting as a DHCP server handing out IPs and all that. Assigned IP address are in the 10.1.1.xxx range with the server at 10.1.1.1. This server runs their office program which is billing and records etc. They had everything running through a switch with no internet. I simply replaced the switch with the router and hooked it up to the cable modem. Now I have the issue of the router wanting to play DHCP server as well, assigning 192.168.1.xxx addresses with it being 192.168.1.1. All the computers seem to ignore the router unless I take the server out of the network and restart all the clients. Then I can have net but no pet access. I can't seem to have both internet AND Pet server. Can I just reconfigure the Pet server to assign the same 192.168.1.xxx ips? If not what are my options? Please help, this should be an easy one!! I hope...

Thank you in advance,
Sean

[Planet]

I would let the router do what routers do, route traffic then set up the server to allow access to each client on the network to run the local application.

[pk1961]

The following assumes you have the ability to perform administrative tasks on the current DHCP server:

If you'd like to let the W2K server continue to act as DHCP server I'd do the following:

1) log into the router and disable DHCP
2) change the address of the router to 10.1.1.y, where y is an address 1-254 and is out of the way of your W2K DHCP scope, (250 would be a guess), logout
3) modify the scope options of the W2K DHCP server so that it has a 003 record (router) and set it to 10.1.1.y, (the new address of the as referenced in step 2)
4) modify static IP setup of W2K server to use 10.1.1.y as default gateway.
5) modify static IP setup of W2K server to use 10.1.1.y as secondary DNS
6) restart workstation to have DHCP changes take effect
The above approach may not cover you if you don't use DNS internally, but it is the most conservative, and least likely to break things.

Another possible method would be to let the router do DHCP and DNS.

1) log into the router
2) change the address of the router to 10.1.1.y, where y is an address 1-255 and is out of the way of your W2K DHCP scope, (250 would be a guess)
3) log into W2K server, disable DHCP
4) modify W2K server static IP setup to use 10.1.1.y as default gateway and DNS
5) restart workstations to have DHCP changes take effect

Good luck.