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DHCP is an extension of the BOOTP protocol, which is another open standards protocol and its job is to automate the configuration of IP addresses on clients of a DHCP server. If you remember earlier in our discussion in earlier modules we talked about the 4 layer architecture of TCP/IP. Well DHCP and the BOOTP protocol live at the upper layers of this architecture, in the application layer. This is one of the applications that utilize the services of TCP and IP. Its benefits as we stated probably couple of times by now is that it reduces configuration management on most of your client computers in the network and by reducing configuration management, by automating configuration management, it also result in fewer configuration errors. A lot of problems, a lot of communication problems in computer networks is usually the result of an incorrect parameter in the IP address of that client computer. It's on the wrong network or it doesn't have a default gateway and so on. Those things can be automated can be done through the computer which does not make mistakes. In fact it only makes the mistakes that you tell it to. How do you do it? You'll use the add/remove Windows components in the control panel. By doing so you will be able to select just the service that does this, it provides automatic IP addressing to DHCP clients. Show you a brief little image to help you visualize what's going to be happening right now. The DHCP Server is a part of the local network, it will then provide IP addresses to DHCP clients, and it will provide those IP addresses from an IP address database or a range or a scope of IP addresses which we'll configure later on in this chapter, in future modules. So just brief mention of some of the newer features in Server 2003's implementation, one is that alternate DHCP client configuration which we took a look at in earlier modules. We can also now backup and restore the DHCP database from the MMC console, which we'll also do and two new groups are created, the DHCP users and DHCP administrators on the machine that's running DHCP. These two groups are created, one, DHCP users can read the contents of the DHCP database, they can look at DHCP through the MMC console. DHCP administrators can actually, as the name imply, administer the database. So let's take a look at the button pushing as we've discussed some of the concepts behind DHCP. It's really, you can probably say it in a sentence, it hands out IP addresses, so how do we install this thing? Well we can use configure your server through the administrative tools but again I prefer going through the control panel and choosing add/remove programs, and then we will add and remove Windows components. After a few seconds for processing now, we're given the windows components wizard, which we can then look down the list and we are looking for networking services, the gray tells me that there are some but not all of these installed. Be careful about checking that by the way, because you will install all of the services. Normally what you want to do is either double click or choose it, choose details and now we're going to install DHCP, the dynamic host configuration protocol. Next, now we're looking for files and the wizard's looking for files and you're pretty much just watching the blue bar progress, so I'll pause it once again while DHCP installs. An interesting thing happens if you have a computer that right now has a dynamically configured IP address, which is exactly what occurred in previous modules and we haven't changed that back One of the things that DHCP requires as we mentioned in previous modules is a static IP address. So even if you forget, you still have the option to change this dynamically assigned IP address by clicking OK. Server 2003 doesn't let you make too many mistakes, not this nature anyway. TCP/IP properties, now let's go back, we'll configure a static IP address, let me pause while I type in the numbers here, alright, now I've got a static IP address configured, I'm going to click on OK, I'm going to close this now, that static IP address is going to bind it to the network card, and when it's done I'll be able to complete the process of installing DHCP and as we talk more throughout the rest of the modules here, you'll understand why that is. Why it's not a good idea or why it can't be that a DHCP server also be a DHCP client and you may have a good inkling of that already. Waiting for the Windows components wizard to finish now, now we're done, click on finish, close this, close that, and now we'll have a new snap-in added to our administrative tools. We will have DHCP, so we'll spend most of the rest of this module talking about DHCP. In the next one we will talk about how the protocol actually helps a client to get an IP address.