Connectivity btw offices

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Vishal

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Hi,

We have regional offices which are connected by point to point VPN.

We don't have any servers in the regional office. Their is a Linksys router
which hands out IP addresses.

We would like to have these computers join our domain in the main office and
instead get Ip addresses from the DHCP server in the main office.

How do I get a Linksys router to do that?

Thanks
 
Re: Connectivity btw offices



"Vishal" <Vishal@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:0CF43638-4662-42D3-80C0-4768933825E5@microsoft.com...
> Hi,
>
> We have regional offices which are connected by point to point VPN.
>
> We don't have any servers in the regional office. Their is a Linksys
> router
> which hands out IP addresses.
>
> We would like to have these computers join our domain in the main office
> and
> instead get Ip addresses from the DHCP server in the main office.
>
> How do I get a Linksys router to do that?
>
> Thanks

To be blunt, that sounds a pretty silly idea. If you had a local DC it
would be fine to run DHCP there. I would not recommend running a central
DHCP server to hand out the network config to remote offices. (I do realise
why you might want to do that, and that the machines can't join the domain
with the config they get by default from the Linksys routers, but I don't
think it is the way to go).

The only real problem is with DNS. The clients in the remote sites
cannot use the DNS relay method used by the Linksys if they are domain
members. They must use the corporate DNS server. Have you looked at the
options offered by the Linksys routers? Can you simply change their config
so that they will hand out your corporate DNS address rather than the local
router address?

If you cannot modify the Linksys at all, then your other plan would not
work either. You would need to disable the DHCP option on the Linksys before
you could force the branch machines to use the main office DHCP server. You
would need to set up a scope for each branch on the corporate DHCP server
and enable DHCP relay on the Linksys routers so that DHCP requests would be
forwarded across the WAN link to the corporate DNS server.
 
Re: Connectivity btw offices

To centralize DHCP the local router and all the routers in the path, have to
be able to forward the local DHCP broadcasts from the client computers to
the central DHCP server. Most small (cheap) routers can't be configured to
do that.

Centralizing DHCP for branch offices works well if you have the network
infrastructure (routers, switches, DHCP software) that will support it. We
use centralize DHCP support for our 20 odd offices that are connected to a
very large (provincial government) network that does centralized DHCP for
well over 30,000 client computers in several hundred locations.

Linksys is a division of Cisco. There are certainly Cisco routers that
support centralizing DHCP, but I don't know if any of those with the Linksys
brand name do.

Regardless of whether you use distributed or central DHCP, the IP addresses
at the remote location have to be local IP addresses - that is specific to
the local LAN. Each site would need its own IP subnet.

For a client computer to be a Domain member, it must have it's DNS server IP
address set to that of the DNS server that is integrated with Active
Directory, or one that can resolve the domain name (and other required
names) to the appropriate IP address.

Some, but not all, small (cheap) routers can be configured to give the
clients one or more specific DNS IP addresses, instead of the default (which
is usually the same as the default gateway IP address). This might avoid
the need to specifically configure the DNS server addresses on the client
computers.

Most small (cheap) routers DHCP services will only "hand out" IP addresses
from one of the "private" IP address ranges (e.g. 192.168.n.n). Because
there will be many LANs that have use IP addresses in these ranges, those IP
addresses can not be routed. Instead, the router will use NAT (Network
address translation) to enable communication from the client computer over
the Internet (or routed private network). I don't know if domain membership
will work with NAT or not - I don't have experience in that.

--
Bruce Sanderson
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders

It is perfectly useless to know the right answer to the wrong question.



"Vishal" <Vishal@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:0CF43638-4662-42D3-80C0-4768933825E5@microsoft.com...
> Hi,
>
> We have regional offices which are connected by point to point VPN.
>
> We don't have any servers in the regional office. Their is a Linksys
> router
> which hands out IP addresses.
>
> We would like to have these computers join our domain in the main office
> and
> instead get Ip addresses from the DHCP server in the main office.
>
> How do I get a Linksys router to do that?
>
> Thanks
 
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