VoIP Quick Tip - ERROR: DHCP CONFLICT

Hello ladies and gents! I just flew back in from Atlanta Georgia last night (and boy are my arms tired!)

I was in Atlanta setting up my first Avaya Distributed Office i40 system for my company's branch office out there. I will be the first to admit that prior to going out there I didn't know too much about Avaya systems at all. For that we hired an Avaya consulting group to do the initial configuration, and to assist me with the install.

Anyhoo, the consulting group we hired didn't coordinate things that well, and the onsite Avaya tech they sent me wasn't an Avaya tech at all, just a general tech. So I therefore had to figure a lot of stuff out.

One of the things that was driving me nuts, that I had to do some Googling on was after a few of the VoIP phones booted up and got their configuration info from DHCP, others would boot up and say:

"ERROR: DHCP CONFLICT"

I had plenty of addresses in the pool available, and all the Windows workstations were pulling addresses just fine.

It turned out that this wasn't an uncommon problem for Avaya phones running on a Windows network using Windows DHCP. To fix it I had to go into DHCP management on the server, click on the server name, then right click and go to Properties > Advanced Tab. In advanced there is an option for conflict detection attempts. By default it is set to zero. Set it to two or three. This way the server will check to see if an address has been issued already before handing it out again to some other device.



Once I set that, the rest of the phones booted up fine, and we were right as rain!

Are you an Avaya admin or guru? Care to share some more tips in the comments?

Posted in: avaya, dhcp conflict, voip