Cisco 871 DHCP Problems

Ran into a problem last week where our vendor’s Cyclades TS100 devices couldn’t acquire an IP address from our Cisco 871 router’s DHCP service.

This was a big problem for us because we have about 70 locations using this router and all of them will have these Cyclades TS100s installed in the next two weeks.

After about two days of troubleshooting/testing and working with the vendor we finally figured out the problem. All we had to do to make it work was enabling spanning-tree portfast on the Cisco 871 ports. What gave it away was when we put a switch in between and the TS100 was able to receive an IP with that set up.

To enable spanning-tree portfast, type in these commands:

en

config t

interface faX

spanning-tree portfast

For more tips on troubleshooting DHCP problems with Cisco devices please see this website:

Troubleshooting DHCP

Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 IT Pros

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

I know this post is a bit late.

Anyway, we attended the Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals in Orlando, Florida last month (June 10-13) and it was a lot of fun! Lots to do and learn. There were a lot of people who attended (close to 9,500 according to Microsoft).

This is my first Tech Ed and I’m really glad I was able to go to this one. There were a lot of sessions to choose from, plenty of labs, free stuff from vendors (if you let them scan your badge to get your information so they can spam you later), etc. I attended mostly sessions and labs on unified communications and security and most of them were pretty good.

There was also an attendee party at Universal Studios on Thursday night (June 12) and that was a lot of fun as well. They pretty much reserved the theme park for that night just for the Tech Ed attendees.

Some pictures below. Next year’s Tech Ed is in Los Angeles, California, I hope I’ll be able to go this one as well!