At a minimum, you should certainly be familiar with the basic purpose of DHCP – to provide client systems with IP addresses. The main reason for the existence of DHCP as a service is the fact that it greatly simplifies the allocation of IP addresses to clients, a process that when done manually can lead to errors, duplication, and a great deal of time spent less than efficiently. Although DHCP does the basic thing that you expect it to in Windows 2000, there is a great deal more functionality that was found in the version from NT 4, and you’ll need to be aware of the differences. Some of the ‘new’ functionality isn’t actually new – for example, DHCP supported the ability to create Superscopes in NT 4 SP2. However, since many of you probably don’t have much experience with Superscopes, I’ll describe them here. On the whole, you’ll probably be impressed with some of the new features of DHCP in Windows 2000, while being able to build on the understanding you originally acquired under NT 4. Nothing like a nice and simple topic to get us started on the last portion of the series.
