Hi, welcome in to the Protocol Deep Dive for DHCP.
My name is Greg Dickinson.
I'm your friendly neighborhood network engineer,
and I will be going with you down this path for the next few minutes as we delve
into all of the wonderful goodness and light that is DHCP,
both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6.
In this module,
I will give you an overview of what we're going to learn
over the next few minutes in this course,
and then we'll dive right in to DHCPv4.
This is the course overview where we just talk about what
we're going to cover in this course,
it's a very short course because we assume that you at least
have a superficial knowledge of what DHCP is being a network
administrator or a network engineer,
and so this is a very in-depth discussion of exactly how the
protocol gets its work done in the real world.
We're going to cover both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 for IPv4
and IPv6 respectively in this course.
We're going to talk about the functions of the protocol,
even though DHCPv6 is very similar to DHCPv4.
There are some crucial differences in the way that
the workstation in configured.
We'll talk about the packet exchange for both protocols,
and again, both of them use a very similar packet exchange process,
but the actual names of the packets are different,
and what they do are actually different,
again, because they are two different IP networking stacks.
We'll talk about how the workstations handle the leases
whenever an IP address is leased,
and what happens at various stages throughout the
lifecycle of that IP address lease.
And we'll talk about some of the advanced options that
you can use with DHCP to handle, for example,
PXE booting for imaging workstations, or running thin clients,
or using Voice over IP phones,
and how to distribute the information about the phone
system through the DHCP server.
We'll then move on to implementing the protocol,
and in the implementation portion of the course,
we'll be implementing DHCP on a Cisco router and in a Windows server.
Again, that doesn't cover 100% of the situations out there,
but in my years of dealing with networks,
I've found that that gets about 80% of the way there,
and the concepts move over very easily to other platforms,
such as an Infoblox, if they're even still around,
or a Juniper router for example.
We'll then move on to troubleshooting, because again,
that's how we as network administrators and network engineers make our money.
We don't make our money when everything is running perfectly.
We're dropped into the middle of a broken network and said,
hey this isn't working, can you make it work?
And this is where we shine.
We'll talk about some of the common implementation mistakes,
some of the things you can do with DHCP,
some of the things that you can't do with DHCP,
and some of the more common methods of correcting those implementation mistakes.
We'll also talk about network failures,
and what happens whenever the packets don't make it to the workstation,
or don't make it to the server,
or they just kind of disappear into the ether because DHCP by default uses UDP,
which as we know is a connectionless protocol and sometimes it just doesn't
make it to the other end and we have no idea that it doesn't.
We'll discuss a few ways to mitigate some of these network failures,
and the best way to find out what's happening given a certain set of symptoms.
And that's it for the course overview. Buckle up and we'll jump right in to DHCPv4.