Topic: Extending DHCP IP lease period

[David Bakody]

Is it possible to give what amounts to a nearly indefinite lease of IP addresses for the local machines in our network?  Is there a template or configuration file I can edit that determines the lease period e-smith grants?

[jrp2]

Yes, there are many ways.  BTW, do a search on this forum, this has come up recently and there are details as to how to do it there.

I should note, this is fairly useless to do.  The DHCP server in SME tends to do effectively that, not reusing an address until absolutely necessary.  Even though a lease has expired it will not reuse that address until it has exhausted the pool, and will deliver the same address to a machine even months later (it keeps track of addresses by MAC address).

Bottom line the default config will almost certainly provide the effect you are looking for, without the inherent dangers of putting in a very long lease.

BTW, another nice way to do this, assuming you have a small number of machines, is to create a "static IP" using the hostname function in the server-manager and enter the machine's MAC address.  That will always give a machine the same IP via DHCP, as well as give it a nice name in DNS too.  This is a really neat feature.

[David Bakody]

Oh, I never thought of that creating a static ip using the hostname function in the server-manager and entering the machine's MAC address.  Yeah, that should do the trick.  Thanks.