I have some basic questions about adding a DHCP server to a existing wireless network. I should start out by saying this network uses Ruckus Wireless equipment. So the AP's use a controller called a Zone Director. Which is not a fully functional router. The switch that came with it has no DHCP relay, its a simple layer 2 fully managed LAN/POE switch. The ZD does have DHCP relay i can configure and assign per Wlan, but im guessing this will only work once i get rid of its public static IP and add it to the DHCP reserved range of ip's. They do give a unique vendor code for the ZD to setup in the DHCP server, to allow discovery of ap's in other subnets or even by dns, thought its easier just to let it autoconfigure and switch it after. It also has other built in DHCP options such as 43, 82, load balancing, and some other nifty things but it has a very limited DHCP server mainly for testing. We have 10 high capacity Ruckus 7982 access points being managed by the ZD. We have a comcast business class SMC gateway with a block of 13 public static ip's in the range of 50.x.x.x/28. We are currently using its LAN DHCP, but for a hotel network 200 IP addresses is nothing, we could run out just being half full, not counting if we have our meeting rooms are occupied. We have a old dell Poweredge running Windows Server 2003R2, we did a clean install and set up a dhcp server set up with 10.x.x.x. We currently have our setup using open authentication and splash page so people have to accept terms to pull an IP, and using idle timeout to keep the complaints down. But the idle timeout is starting to irk our regulars and people who use VPN's that forget about needing an IP address first. Would like to just let the lease last for a month at a time and have a few thousand IP's in the pool Also the server has only one NIC. There's some of the facts. We have not tested hooking up the Win 2003 server yet. Just wanted to get a little advice first Currently the LAN DHCP from comcasts gateway is handing out its measly IP addresses to the clients and AP's, with the hardware and ap's statically assigned out of the client broadcast range. When we take down the comcast gateway and assign some reserved/static IP's to the AP's and its controller will simply plugging in the DHCP server into the layer 2 switch allow discovery of the dhcp server and start handing out IP's? Also would we just use comcasts gateway DNS addresses in the DHCP server setup? Would we need to set a router address in the DHCP for each AP we have on the network. Shutting off the comcast LAN will of course require us to connect both the server and gateway to the switch with only one NIC on the server. This of course leaves us with using the comcast static gateway, which is in a different subnet as the range we want broadcast on the switch. Can we use both the public IP address and local reserved IP and the comcast gateway address on the NIC to allow discovery of the dhcp server, or do we really need to 2 NIC's. Sorry the ruckus support all in India give me crap for answers when I talk to them. Forgive my lack of knowledge, no formal training in networking. Though i am rather good at building water cooled computers and playing FPS games. I did actually run the cable and install the Ruckus network equipment. Previously i installed and configured a old NC-3500 controller and Lucent orinoco POE. But 100 concurrent users was not enough capacity. As the equipment we have was meant to work together its very easy to work with on its own. Tomorrow going to hook up an old Cisco catalyst 2950 and spare router to test. It's hooked to comcast as well, I gave it a address in the Win 2003 DHCP server scope. I can access it remotely through server right now. One question though, Will both the comcast 10.1.10.1 lan dhcp and the the 10.0.0.1 dhcp server be able to exist on the network at the same time for testing. Or would i need to turn off comcast for a bit to test.. and tick off a bunch of guests. I could set up the ap's as standalone and remove them from the controller for a while, just a pain to do that. Anyone that can give me a good avenue of attack on this, i would greatly appreciate it.

I think this is a question better directed to Comcast / Cicco /Ruckus. Generally we can really only provide help on Microsoft products.