Now a Host’s ability to send data to all the required
destinations requires a bit of information. The host
needs to know the following at a minimum…
• What’s my IP address?
• What’s my network mask?
• What are the IP addresses of the DNS servers?
• What’s my default gateway?
Well how do we get this information to the PC when
it comes online? We’ve got two options:
• Visit each workstation and configure the
information manually
• Enable each workstation for DHCP
And sooner or later, some of that information is
going to change and the hosts will need to know
about these changes. If there is something I want to
tell you about the future of your career maybe you
are starting to get certiified or you just happened to
find yourself in IT, change is constant. I’m not
talking about protocol changing or more security. I
mean just change on your network. You can never
assume that your network will always remain the
same. The day is going is going to come when you
just change an IP address on the DNS Server and
not many of us run a network that has 5 PC’s and if
you are a network admin and you run a full time job
then let me know if you are hiring. Lol because it
doesn’t happen very often as you’ll have several
dozens or several hundreds of PC’s.
If you previously hardcoded the information on all of
the hosts, you’ll now have to go out and visit every
workstation again and change the information
manually. You and I have better things to do with
our time believe me.
If you use DHCP to begin with, you now just have to
change the information on the DHCP server.
DHCP is starting to sound pretty good! When the
choice is visiting hundred’s or thousands of host on
a typical netork manually or using DHCP to
dynamically handle IP address assignment
information, there really is no choice.
Maybe your IP addresses are static, but your DNS
server is going to change someday and your
gateway addresses is also going to change one
day. There is nothing evil if your network uses hard
coded addresses lol and I’m not insulting you in any
way. I’m saying it is efficient in the long run.
source: http://tutorialslodge.com/dynamic-host-configuration-protocol-dhcp/