Day 1 Many days before and Today`

Alright lets get this IT ball rolling.

The before time:

I have had formal training on Cisco based equipment (I took CCNA classes) but the company I currently work at started with SOHO-SMB equipment when I joined them. By SOHO-SMB I mean Linksys routers and 3Com's baseline switches (which is basically their Small Business solutions before they got bought.)
When the company moved about a year ago to a new facility we didn't really upgrade so much as do a horizontal move and a reorganization of the equipment to fit the new facility layout. (We had to use a wireless access point rather then a wireless router as our router was to be in a closet no where near our actual office space.) The Access point is D-Link's answer to SMB. Its a DAP-2553. Great piece of equipment but has its faults.  The most notable being that like most SMB grade equipment it needs to be restarted to save configurations unlike Enterprise grade where there is a running configuration that you edit and then copy to the startup configuration.

Alright now that that rant is over here comes Today's rant:

So I finally got the company on to a Cisco 2621 router. YAY REAL EQUIPMENT! Sorry about that.... So, now I am trying to implement static dhcp addressing (my reason for this rather then assigning the IP addresses on the computers and devices themselves is so that if the addressing scheme needs to change I can do it without having to go to each device and change it thus cost savings for the company.) I get it working for all windows and firmware based devices. HOWEVER, the Ubuntu 10.10 server I am putting together so that I can get a Nagios box running is having a really hard time accepting a dhcp address assignment. I had been using the "client-identifier" command for a while with no result. I even tested the assignment against a windows box and it worked, but not with the Ubuntu box. I see it getting regular dhcp addressing. so I think what if I try the other command "hardware-address" which (according to the Cisco guide on DHCP configuration) states "Specifies a hardware address for the client. This command is used for BOOTP requests." I thought that the dhcp client on the Ubuntu box was requesting through ethernet media type. It is on a computer that ran Windows XP before. <-- that thought made sense to me. but I tried it anyway. Guess what... it worked. WTF??? Why is Ubuntu using BOOTP to get its addressing?!?! Well now it all works and I know for next time. Hope this helps someone else. If it does Please let me know.




Summary: 


Networking equipment should not need to restart every time you save a configuration change. 
D-Link has this issue but is still good. 


Cisco is awesome. 


Ubuntu apparently requests IP addresses through BOOTP and shouldn't 


-END