3com access point and dhcp service

This may sound dumb as it seems you know what your doing but just in case:

You are plugging the cat5 from your LAN into the WAN of the AP?? Sorry but have seen it done before.

This is what I did. I gave each DHCP a different pool of addresses so that there would be no conflicts. Initially that worked, but as I added the third laptop I noticed by its' IP address that it had received an address from our server's DHCP and not from the a/p.

Then I went to look at the client list on the a/p and found that it had given out addresses to some wired machines. So even though they are giving out different addresses they are trying to service the same LAN and this will cause problems.

Windows 2K DHCP is supposed to generate an alert when there is another unauthorized DHCP on the same LAN, but so far I have not seen it.

Not sure as to why you didn't get an ip address. If the a/p is on a switch/network that has dhcp you should get an ip address just like if you plugged into the switch..

Can't you set the scope so that it's the same but using ip, as from your switch dhcp 192.168.123.1 to100 and from your a/p 192.168.123.101 to 254 that way all would work and no over lap ip's...

Why would it cause a problem? If they are both offering the same range then there shouldn't be an issue unless you want to say why.

The AP DHCP service is operating correctly, it's a DHCP service, it doesn't need to care whether it's the wired or wireless and because the AP is just a layer 2 bridge it's very possible as you've seen, that the wired DHCP server will also service clients.

There really is no benefit to running the access point DHCP service.

Nope, it's only for detecting Windows 2000/2003 DHCP servers which haven't been authorised in Active Directory.

David.

I agree that doing DHCP on the AP is a bad idea, but initially I had to in order to get this thing to work. Oddly enough the DHCP option only appears in the configuration windows when I assign a static IP to the AP. Maybe I'll let the AP get its' IP from my 2K server. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Exactly what I thought when I was trying this yesterday. Except I could NOT get the Win server to give me an IP, which made it a little difficult to find the AP to turn the DHCP back on. In my case it's a WRT54G with Talisman and I was just testing it with a Win95 machine with internet connection sharing, so it's possible that the DHCP server under ICS is simply too crippled to be useful, but it was frustrating, anyway.

Why would you have to configure to do dhcp to assign a static ip address? It's quite sensible to only let you make it offer dhcp when it has a static ip address otherwise it wouldn't know what scope to offer addresses from.

Why not just assign the ap a static address?