Is this behavior by design, is it a microsoft bug, is it how the dhcp service is suposed to run?

After much testing I discovered why my 2 DHCP servers weren't working. They each have 2 IP address and one nic each. Each has one external and one internal 192.168.x.x address.

I soured the web but could not find any info on this, until I ran into a 3rd server which had the same problem. (I installed a DHCP server on an nt 4 machine with one nic and 2 ip addresses and it did not work either, 2 nics in and all is well)

Any of you heard of this, ran into this, have any information regarding this? google didnt turn out too good of results, mostly about using dhcp with dsl as a client.

yeppers

u can not have 2 dhcp servers on the same network cause they will have IP address conflicts - especially if you have 2 of them connecting to the internet and both the 2nd nic's will be trying to use

192.168.0.1

OK now I will splain further.

ONe dhcp server was set too give out 192.168.0.10-125

The other was set to give out 126-254 (for redundancy) (MCSE training suggests using backup DHCP servers using this method.

Both are authorized in AD so thats not issue. As you can see, no conflict.

The problem seems to be having 2 IP addresses on on nic, on both machines. I have previously not heard of this issue before. I figured why have 2 nics when I can have one in each. Also note too, there was not always 2 dhcp servers anyways, in my troubleshooting both have been disabled and enabled separately and together. As it is, the network has autoassigned 169.254 addresses, with hosts files pointing to the proxy server (YUCK!) About 50 machines.

Next week I will be adding a second nic to my main server and see if it fixes it (It did at another site on an nt 4 server)