Summary
DHCP can be a very important protocol for use
on both small and large networks. By concentrating configuration details into a
single server, you can greatly simplify the network configuration of client
computers running just about any OS. The main cost is that the DHCP server
itself requires configuration and maintenanceif it goes down or is misconfigured,
clients on the network may not be able to operate correctly. You can configure
a DHCP server to issue IP addresses from a pool, without regard to what
computer receives a particular address, or on a fixed basis, in which a
particular computer receives the same IP address time after time. The latter is
probably the best configuration if you need to contact DHCP clients by name,
but even dynamic IP addresses can be linked to hostnames by having the DHCP
server and the domain's DNS server communicate with each other using features
in version 3 of the Linux DHCP server.