Printers and DHCP

Most administrators handle printers in very different ways. My personal favorite (works with MS DHCP and ISC DHCP) is to:

1. Assign a static DHCP based IP address for the printer in DHCP, and call it lpt-name_of_printer. (i.e., lpt-marketingcolor01 is the reservation 00:11:22:33:44:55 has for 192.168.78.51)

2. Set up a DNS entry for it (lpt-marketingcolor01.mydomain.local  as an A record for 192.168.78.51)

3. Create the printer on the print server, using the fully qualified hostname as the address (or in MS parlance: creating a new port -> standard TCP/IP -> use the fully qualified hostname.

The advantage of this is that if you need to renumber printers, you simply need to modify the reservation and the DNS entry, not the actual printer. Some printers do support supplying a DHCP hostname, but with this method, you have more control.