Oopsie...

Based on some really good advice I got here I changed out a bunch of the hardware on a network that I run.  This was due , in part, to the fact that the person who installed a firewall/router on the network did not leave behind a password to access it.  I managed to get everything set up again without too much trouble but in my exhaustion I made a minor error.  When enabling DHCP on the router, I inadvertently chose an address range different from the old one.  For all of the machines and devices it was fine, they were simply assigned new ones in the current range.  However, the server is another issue.  It's ipaddress and dns settings were manually configured.  Now none of the devices can see networked drives on the server.  I manually assigned the server a new ipaddress in the new range, and even changed the range in DHCP settings on the router.  Neither of those seemed to work.  Can anyone point me in the right direction on the best and quickest way to realign the server and the rest of the network?  Thanks!

You want to choose a static IP address for your server that is not in the DHCP range of the router, but is on the same subnet.

So if your internal network is using the  192.168.1.0 subnet you will want to set your DHCP server to use some thing like 192.168.1.50 - 192.168.1.200 for the DHCP assignable addresses.  This leaves you

192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.49 and 192.168.1.201 -192.168.1.254 for any static addresses items like Servers Printers your Router and Switches.

So now you can map ranges of addresses like 192.168.1.20 - 192.168.1.40 for your printers and a range like 192.168.1.41 - 192.168.1.49 for your servers.

Once you have the IP addresses set you then have to let your Internal DNS know the name mapping from your server and printer names to IP addresses.  Or add an entry to every PC's host file to point the name to the IP address.  So if your Router is performing the DNS function you need to add the static addresses to the DNS table in the router.

That should get you running.

Another option is to hard map the "Static" IP address in the DHCP server to the Server MAC address and let the server use DHCP to get its address.

Dave

Dave,

           Once again thanks.  I determined that the old router was handling DHCP by disabling it in the new one to see if addresses were still being handed out.  They weren't.  I am not sure how to determine what is handling DNS though.  I don't see a setting for it in the router interface so I just assumed it was being handled by the server.  Which brings me to my next quandary:  The DNS data for the router was supplied by the ISP.  The DNS info in the servers tcp/ip (i think) match those settings given to me by the isp.  Is there a separate setting for internal DNS?  Or should changing the static IP pretty much do it?  Thanks.

The DNS server your router pushes out needs to be the static IP of your internal server if you're running a windows active directory server.  Then all should be made clean again on reboot.

It's okay if there's only one DNS server that the router pushes out...  if you want to push out more than one, push out the Active Directory server first, then the ISP DNS server (so people can still browse the web if the AD server is down).

Then you check your server DNS (you should find it in Administrative Tools).  If you right click the server and go to properties, you should see a Forwarders tab.  Make sure your ISP provided DNS servers are in here.  That way if your internal DNS server doesn't know where something is, it will forward the request to the outside servers.

Also, take a look at converting your external DNS forwarders to OpenDNS instead of the ISP-provided ones.  You can do some free web filtering if you want.

If you haven't wiped your old router, you can boot a PC hooked up on the lan side of the router and from the command prompt on the PC do an  

ipconfig /all

This will list the IP parameters that the DHCP server gives the PC (if you have no Wan connection you may not see the ISP addresses)  If the DNS server is the IP of your router then that is your primary DNS source, if is the IP of your Windows server then that is the source and can be examined as Chris said above.

Dave

Hey!  I got it sorted out.  Server back online.  I did have to remap the network drives to all the client machines.  And it seems the network has slowed down a noticeably. Thanks for all the help.