First things first, IT pros.

Web Engineer Christopher Davis was charged with migrating all his company's IP ranges from one NT 4.0 DHCP server to another. That's no big deal nowadays, with the availability of Microsoft's "lovely" automated DHCP Migration Wizard that simplifies the process, Davis said.

But several years ago, Davis had to perform the migration the old-fashioned way -- manually.

He created new ranges for each subnet on the new DHCP server and did not activate them. Davis then deactivated the old DHCP ranges and turned on the new ones.

"Great, right?" he said. "No. All heck broke loose."

When he enabled the newly migrated DHCP ranges, error messages indicating duplicate IP address popped up on every PC on the network. That added up to 2,000 users.

Davis realized he hadn't done the first thing first: release the previous IP address leases before the migration to the new server.

He explained the blooper this way: "For instance, say a PC had the xxx.xxx.xxx.xx1 IP address and the lease was not set to expire for a week," he said. "If you don't release the IP addresses before you migrate, once the new DHCP server is turned on, it issues xxx.xxx.xxx.xx1 to another PC. And BOOM!"

Davis ended up having to ensure every DHCP-enabled device on the network either had been rebooted or had released its old IP address.

Now that Davis knows the manual migration process by heart, the DHCP Migration Wizard has made it obsolete.

"This happened several years ago," Davis said. "But it is still painful to recall."

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