alt Hacker News> There is one DHCP server.
There'd better be or your network is probably hosed.
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At work I manage a network with two DHCP servers. One is a dnsmasq that assigns the IP address, hostname, and basic network parameters to all network devices, and the other is a LTSP server (https://ltsp.org/) that provides network boot images only for certain devices that require it. It might not look pretty, but it works really well.
What really matters is that there's a coherent policy for assigning addresses, which is absolutely compatible with having multiple DHCP servers on the same subnet (e.g. each server configured to hand out non-overlapping IP ranges).
Well, consumer Windowses (XP Home? It’s been a while) used to hose networks because they were "helpfully" running their own DHCP server.
Windows supports dhcp failover, where multiple dhcp servers can exist on the same subnet.
You don’t have to have one. My first LAN didn’t. I had no idea what I was doing and picked 17.0.0.0 addresses for local ones and I couldn’t connect to Apples website.
That works mostly, you'll have problems if you have duplicate IP addresses though.
In theory it's fine to have multiple DHCP servers as long as they don't step on each other. But in reality a bunch of the things mentioned in this post are ways for the network to be hosed. Unfortunately, enough LANs are semi-hosed that it's worth working around known problems.