Topic: DHCP assigned address for SME server

[sgwestrip]

A company I do IT consultancy for has just changed their broadband provider to BT Business Broadband Single. They run SME server in 'server only' mode and before the change of broadband provider had a 192.168.x.x address which was NAT'd to from their static IP address.

With BT Broadband this set up is not available as they have a weird and wonderful system where the router assigns the static IP address directly to the server using what they call ' DHCP Fixed'. What that means in practice is that the server has the public static IP address assigned to the network interace and through the (invisible) routing on the broadband router that address is accessible both from the LAN and externally (but only on ports specified in the firewall).

So, what I need to be able to do is not assign any IP address to the SME server and let it use DHCP. I can then use the broadband router to assign it the static IP address. Is this possible?

I hope this makes sense and I appreciate any help given.

Thanks,
Steve

[del]

Hi Steve,

I am not 100% sure I understand how BT are doing this but if the router is providing IP addresses to the whole LAN then maybe you could add a second NIC in the server and set SME to server/gateway using the dhcp option in the configuration, set SME as the DHCP server, purchase a workgroup switch/hub and plug all the computers on the LAN into the new switch/hub making sure that the DHCP IP range in SME is diiferent from BT's and it should work.
You can then open/forward the ports you require in the BT router to the server.
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It would look something like this:
BT Router connected to NIC 1 with SME in server/gateway (SME will get it's IP address from the router)
NIC 2 will connect SME to the LAN (via a seperate switch/hub)
All PC's will connect to the seperate switch/hub and SME will assign them an IP address. Note: the router and switch/hub are NOT connected.
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I recently helped my mate in the UK with this setup so he could use Sail/Asterisk in sever/gateway mode. (As recommended by jonroberts, thanks jon) his Linksys router allowed us to add the SME server in the DMZ, so all ports are going to it. I hope this helps.

Regards,
Del