Competing DHCP servers

Four months ago the main server of my company¹ broke, really, really hard – two disks in a RAID5 in a week – so as I found myself solving the issue as it often happens. It was a Vmware ESXi that failed to notify that disks were failing. Not a sound, not a email. It happens when those who set up the machine left the company without leaving any documentation of what they have set up. So in order:

• the failed server was the only Domain Controller in an Active Directory domain. That means it provided DHCP. I activeted DHCP on the humble NetGear DSL router.
• I moved data of the (oldish) acconting program to a Samba share on my own machine, adding some users and groups.
• asked our (almost life-long) hardware-software supplier to lend us a spare server where I set up Windows Server and SQL server. They promptly gave us a comparable machine. They never failed to reasonably satisfy our needs as their technicians knows that leaving clients “in the cold” (i.e. with inoperative hardware) is a key to failure.

This part took me half a day. Then I spent the next full four days trying to install our fully licensed SQL server 2008. There were no way. I gave up, calling for help. Then after another full day on unsuccessful tries by a technician with more than 25 years of experience we concluded that it is almost impossible to install nowadays SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008. Mind me, installed from original physical supports, the one used to install them on the first server. Why? It seems – please correct me as I’m not sure about it – that SQL server tries to upgrade some .Net infrastructure that is no more available for Win 2008. Yet another reason to stick to software libero² . We ended up installing the “gratis”, limited version as our database luckily fits the space limit imposed.

… four months later the new server that the chairman – one of the three shareholder – bought finally arrives, you know we make sand and concrete we don’t buy servers on a daily basis and the developer of the ad-hoc application who reviewed the process of server acquisition and the specs came to set it up.

So I promptly gave him the binder where I collected all the setups I made: the VPN, the shares, the IP static and dynamic, which kind of services are active and where.

I dearly hope that he will not come up saying that the NetGear is a Rogue DHCP

; really I hope he will not as it is not rogue. I had to set it up back in february to let people work. I gave him full access to the administrative console of the NetGear. I told him of the DHCP server.

So I’m a little puzzled to see it hasn’t been deactivated, leaving us with two competing, legimite DHCP servers on the same local network. I also suspect that their addresses range does overlap. There are worse things in life, tought.

I also had an access point in the test laboratory. I hope it will not be considered a Rogue access point   too.

A rogue access point is a wireless access point that has been installed on a secure network without explicit authorization from a local network administrator,^[1] whether added by a well-meaning employee or by a malicious attacker.

Truly it’s really hard to claim it’s rogue; we are so a small firm that we do not have a full-time network administrator. Actually I’ve been called to solve network and IT problems so often that from an external naive point of view I may be consider a network administrator promoted on the field.