BlankReg   11270 pts.  |   Jun 22 2009  6:16PM GMT

I think you are right Sonotsky, the PC should get a new IP address. It does not ‘remember’ this it should always start the DHCP process when it has been disconnected, and re-connected to a network as it doesn’t know where it is ! If it was connected back to the original subnet, the server would issue the same IP address, as it is within the lease time, but on a different subnet, it gets a new IP which is correct for the new subnet.

Robert Stewart   1810 pts.  |   Jun 23 2009  2:32PM GMT

Yes you should recieve a new ip, unless both the original network and the subnet are getting their dhcp leases from the same dhcp server, which then you could possibly recieve the same ip depending on how your dhcp config is setup.

Robert Stewart   1810 pts.  |   Jun 23 2009  2:35PM GMT

Just clarification you will get new ip when moving to new subnet, otherwise it would not be a subnet, correct??

BlankReg   11270 pts.  |   Jun 26 2009  6:49AM GMT

Correct - the dhcp request is ‘tagged’ by the router if it comes from a different subnet, so the DHCP server knows what range to use for the allocated address, or it ’sees’ it come directly then it knows to allocate from the same range as itself.

Only if you went back onthe original subnet, would you get your original address allocated a second time, and only if you were within the 8 days.

IMHO - DHCP leases should very rarely need to be more than a working day. The overhead on the network and the server is very small, so expiring the lease and re-issueing an IP address more often is not really a problem. I usually stick to leases of around 4 to 10 hours. On a high turnover network it can be as short as 30 minutes to an hour. The main issue if it is much longer, is that you can run out of pool addreses if there is a high turnover of systems attaching to the network, a shorter lease means that addresses are released more frequently.

Snapper70   540 pts.  |   Jun 26 2009  7:15PM GMT

The only argument for a longer lease is normally to cover an outage of your DHCP server. If it goes down for some reason, and is down for 24 hours, then clients with 8-hour leases will not have an address at the end of that period.

Note the way Microsoft DHCP works - the client goes through multiple stages:
1. When connected, or when rebooting, request a new lease. Typically the server will assign the same
one, unless it had expired.
2. When the lease reaches 50%, the client attempts to renew the lease. So on an 8-hour lease, that
will happen every 4 hours. If it can, server and client reset their counters, and the lease is valid for
another 8 hours.
3. If the server is unavailable, client will continue using the lease it had.
4. IF the lease reaches something like 90%, the client will then “aggressively” look for ANY DHCP
server to get a lease from, not necessarily the one it used before. “the end is coming”
5. At lease expiry, it must relinquish the IP address, and will resort to 0.0.0.0. An XP (or presumably
Vista) client will then resort to the Microsoft generated IP address in the range of 169.254.x.x;,
and periodically try to get a valid lease.

I believe if you reboot a PC or disconnect/reconnect, the PC can’t just assume it can use the address it had previously. To see this, unplug your PC and just connect it to an old hub. It has a link and will fail to renew it’s lease, and within a minute will have an address of 169.254.x.x.