Episode 14 — DHCP by Design: scope sizing, resilience, and failure signals
DHCP is a core dependency in many network scenarios, and CloudNetX often tests whether you understand how DHCP design choices affect availability and troubleshooting outcomes. This episode defines DHCP scopes, leases, and options as the mechanism that turns a network into something usable for clients, providing addressing, default gateway information, name resolution settings, and other essential parameters. The first paragraph focuses on scope sizing as capacity planning, including reserving space for growth, understanding lease timing tradeoffs, and anticipating device churn in environments like wireless networks or temporary workspaces. It also explains resilience patterns such as split scopes and redundant services, and it highlights how DHCP interacts with segmentation and routing when relays are required between clients and servers. The goal is to treat DHCP as an architectural component whose reliability is just as important as switching and routing.
