DHCP for Windows 2000

Chapter 7. Advanced DHCP

In the previous three chapters, I discussed the design of a DHCP infrastructure, the installation and configuration of the DHCP servers, and finally the installation and configuration of the DHCP clients.

This chapter is devoted to tidying up the remaining components that relate to the configuration of DHCP in Windows 2000.

In most situations, a basic DHCP implementation contains one or more DHCP servers, scopes, and exclusions, some reservations, and various DHCP options. There are special situations that require the use of some of these advanced DHCP tools, such as superscopes and the DHCP relay agent. This chapter explores these tools and adds them to your DHCP toolbox.

Superscopes

A superscope is a group of scopes that are managed as a single entity. Typically, a superscope is used where a DHCP server is being used to support DHCP clients on a single physical network that has multiple IP subnets in use. This is sometimes referred to as multinetting.

Why would there be multiple logical subnets in use on a single physical network? Sometimes this occurs when a subnet is being depleted of available IP addresses and more addresses need to be used. For example, if a company has a single Class C network address, the company has 254 IP addresses to use. If the company is growing and has used all of these addresses, the company needs to purchase another Class C network address and route the data between the two networks. Since these address ranges are not contiguous, ...