Can a RODC also be a DHCP ?

June 8, 2008

Sounds like a no-brainer, but there is catch. I installed DHCP role on my Server Core that I had previously set up as Read-only Domain Controller, using this command.

start /w ocsetup DHCPServerCore

And then I went ahead and set the service configuration to “auto” with this command,

sc config dhcpserver start= auto (note the space between the equal sign and auto

And then finally when I tried to start the DHCP service with the following command, it failed with these errors.

net start dhcpserver

A system error has occured

The request is not supported

So the catch was, that since RODC can’t write back to the AD to create the needed DHCP security groups i.e DHCP Administrators and DHCP Users, the service would fail.

After creating those domain local security groups on another Windows Server 2008 RWDC, the service does run successfully and you can manage the DHCP Server (that is running on Server Core) from another server using RSAT.

Filed under: Server Core, Windows Server 2008 |