hi admins.

this is NOT a complaint at all, but a research question.

do u remember the start of the event, we (players) couldn't get an IP address at some period becuase of the DHCP server doing weird things?

as an admin, i'm curious to what happened, and how we other admins can avoid this problem in the future? what precautions should we take?

also - how do u find out which bitches had bloody dhcp servers running!! i got some dumb arsed 192.168.0.x IP (class c private) at one point near the start.

if i was an admin there, i would have picked up a chair and smashed it over the users head if i found them runing dhcp there - silly boyz!

anyways - serious questions above. any serious answers admins please?

/me another curious admin.

are static IP's a common method for large lans?

also, can u block certain ports on the switches that were used at BDI?

for example.

give everyone who enters a static IP addy. block things like port 67/68 (dchp client/server ports?) so that way, dhcp packets don't get past the switches, that connect ot the other players, reducing network traffic?

but how hard is it control static ip's in an event like BDI? eg. imagin i was given ip 10.10.41.1 (i was on switch 41 i think). But to fux0r the admins, i steal IP .8, which is someone elses, who gets an IP conflict when they connect. Might sound like a silly question, but you gotta plan for scenario's like this i assume....

hm. interesting.

/me

Ok the main problem was that for a while another device was attached to the network on the same IP as the main DHCP server hence preventing much legit DHCP traffic. We didn't notice for a while as it obviously pinged fine and we didn't notice the differing MAC addresses. Once it was removed or reconfigured DHCP was fine again.

As for the rogue DHCP servers we are filtering the DHCP ports on the core, so any rogue servers would only have been affecting at most one or two tables and we were logging them so usually we can find the port they are on within a couple of minutes, however the network guys were chasing down the problems caused by the Spanning Tree Protocol going nuts and rebuilding the network 'map' every minute or so and weren't able to do much of this chasing up quickly.

We've considered Static IP's but in general for Shafted we have a crowd that has mainly been to LANs before and know to turn ICS etc off so its not much of a problem. However at BDI we estimate quite a large number of the attendee's have never been to a LAN before and have no idea how to set a static IP/DNS/etc and could waste 2-5 minutes per person getting them setup by assists, if 200-300 people were in that state it would take anywhere from a total of 6 to 25 hours to get them going.