So I had a funny one today. Bit of back story first:

Client who we look after the broadband, voice, router, pabx for rang up complaining of having trouble connecting a new laptop to his network. I just checked basics, wireless key was good, lets try on ethernet cable, no good - probably a driver issue as everything else was operational on the network and router looked fine.

So he gets his "IT Guy" back who obviously mucked around for a bit... and then for god knows what reason, decided it would be a good idea to factory reset our router. It's a Mikrotik, so came up with the default config which of course didn't get it anywhere near operational, not too mention blew away the VPN config for his other site, our remote access etc...

I get the "IT Guy" to reconfigure at least the PPP interface so I can get in and get our config reloaded (thank god for scripted backups, albeit this one was getting to be close to a month old). Do all that and all good, phone system re-registers, PC's have internet access again, site-to-site VPN back up.

That was about a week ago.

Fast forward to today, and client rings again with complaints of file sharing not working, can't print blah blah blah. And, of course, it's all our routers fault!

He has his "IT Guy" on site who I have a conversation with and suggest perhaps was the windows server the thing doing DHCP for the network? My VERY limited Windows server knowledge made me ask does the server have the DHCP role installed (was I right?). So I suggested, lets turn off the routers DHCP server and see if you get one from the server. Now this is where I seriously began to question the "IT Guy's" knowledge as he then asked, how do I force the computer to get a new IP address?.... ummm do ipconfig /release and then /renew..... Like really? It doesn't give a new lease, so no worries, turn router DHCP back on.

But that leads to me my question, as I watched leases get dished out I see a whole bunch get given to the same MAC, and the hostname is the server hostname....

So my question... what's going on there?

I don't have to fix this, but it would just be good to know if I ever see it again.