Thursday, February 11, 2010

What is DHCP, its Benefits, its lease Lease process…. Explained the Dummy way

DHCP and its benefits explained.

As explained in almost all articles related to DHCP, DHCP is Dynamic Host configuration Protocol, A protocol used to ease administration of network by automating the IP address assignment on a network.

  1. They Help in avoiding the IP address conflicts which may arise due to manual assigning of IP addresses by the network administrators.
  2. If the Network topology changes, an administrator needs to reflect the new changes at one central location and all machines update themselves at the next lease request/renewal time. Else without it imagine changing DNS server IP or a Default gateway IP on a network having 1000 clients.
  3. It helps in address management as stale IP addresses can be reused without any human intervention. Like if machines are replaced, an administrator has to reassign the same IP as old machine and if the replaced machine is plugged in somewhere on the network.

In today’s networking world, one cannot imagine life without DHCP. It is a client server technology, therefore has a server component and a client component. The server component is supported by almost all operating systems and many networking devices like routers, Switches.