Well, like I said, you can use static IP, it would just be a lot of manual setup. You are a better man than I, if you are willing to type in all those hostnames and IPs.

One problem with what you are thinking about now is that you are going to have the Linksys router doing DHCP, but want to have DDNS for laptops.

The problem with that is, as far as I know, you can't do DDNS unless the DHCP server and DNS server are on the same machine, or at least, they are on two machines that can talk to each other and exchange that sort of data. You aren't going to be able to setup something like that with a generic Linksys router.

So if you really need DDNS/DHCP for laptops, you will need to disable DHCP on the router, and run DHCP on the main server. Not really a big problem, but something to keep in mind.

Oh c#@@!

Question time! Very Basic. If I disable DHCP on my router - it still remains my gateway however - right? And the XP clients just broadcast for the DHCP server.

So the DHCP server can be on any IP and the DNS lookup is pegged as the DNS/BIND server for the first and my IP's primary DNS server for the second.

So far so good?

Right

Disabling the DHCP server on the router, and moving it to a server on the LAN will have no effect to the clients. DHCP is broadcast based, so the clients never know where the DHCP server is in the first place.

Disabling the DHCP server on the router will have no effect on it's other functions, so your network won't change (as far as the clients know).

As for the DNS list on the clients, yes, you would want your local DNS server to be the first entry (since it is the fastest to query) and then whatever DNS server you have from your ISP would be the second.

It also wouldn't hurt to have another DNS server listed (ideally one that is not from your ISP) as a third, in case your ISPs DNS goes down temporarily (this has happened with both Comcast and Verizon in the past).

Good point! Thank you very much MS3FGX! I should be good to go. Tomorrow I will atttempt to implement.

I'll let everyone know how it goes. Should take me a couple days.