I was working in the sales department of a small IT company (~5 employees) but I have a feeling I would've been more useful if I replaced the guy who was employed to be the developer and systems administrator, all alone.
I have a feeling that the current system was built by the person that worked there before him.
There was no DHCP, so all boxes needed to be configured manually. This caused some problems for the CEO who had a laptop that he took home every day. Until I showed that Windows had support for semi-automatic IP configuration where you'd get a static IP if DHCP timed out.
The standard routine of the guy who worked there was to enter the network details of another box, including the same IP address, and then roll his eyes and say "I don't know what's wrong... It worked on that computer!"
Another thing that he had going was the "new version" of the web application we were selling. He frowned everytime someone mentioned it.
I stayed there for about 6 months, then I gave up and quit. I came to the conclusion that the average time people stayed in the company was 3 months.
put all the boxes at the top
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 10:08.put all the boxes at the top of the ip range and leave the lower like 10 or so ips for DHCP and have DHCP enabled but have everything on static that should work. Done it for years for security.
Umm...
Submitted by fen (not verified) on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 00:02.If you're relying on dhcp for network security then you're a worse admin than the first guy.
To provide a secure ethernet lan you need a decent radius server (ie. not the crapware ms are pushing, freeradius is the win) and an IEEE 802.1x compatible managed switches/clients (any os compatible with wireless wpa should be more or less compatible with 802.1x)
As for the OP, its obviously too late now but, grow some balls and make a decision, no dhcp? the correct thing to do would be to politely inform the prior admin that's a f*cking imbecile and to set up a correctly configured dhcp server.