I'm hoping you guys can help me ...

I use a notebook PC at home and at work. But, unlike most people, I don't work at the same building every day. Also, my work uses static IP's. So, everyday, after I boot up my machine, I have to reconfigure my IP, Gateway and Subnet and reboot. It is really getting annoying. A coworker suggested to me that I set up several hardware profiles, one for each building, so that when I boot up, I can select "Building 1" or "Building 2" and the machine would boot up with whatever IP I had assigned the last time I used that hardware profile. Well, it didn't work. It just uses the last IP assigned to the NIC, not to the hardware profile (unless I did something wrong).

Is there some program out there that can help me? I'm running Win2K Pro.

Wow, sounds to me like the root of the problem is that your company needs to step out of the Stone Age and put in a DHCP server.

I mean, that's just cruel, making you mess with IPs like that. What were they thinking? My God, it's not like DHCP is rocket science or anything.

Tony, I agree. But I work for probably the largest corporation in the entire world, so I don't think I'll have much luck convincing them to change their policy... things move very slowly around here....

Holy cow. How can a large corporation even maintain a network at all without DHCP?

Jesus, even in my little 40-user department that I run, it would be a full time job just keeping on top of all the IP addresses if it weren't for DHCP. I can't fathom how a big company would do it.

Remind me what backwards-ass company you work for again?

Can any of the network guys here give a good reason as to why a big company might choose not to implement DHCP on each of its subnets? Why fixed addressing would outweigh the benefits of DHCP?

I know that this disucssion isn't helping to solve your problem, sorry for getting off on a tangent. I'm just amazed that any network administrator would be masochistic enough to do the fixed address thing.

No need for a DHCP server? Just a guess... It IS a total pain in the butt, but maybe if I explain my part of the network, it will help.

The network I work within consists of about 15 or so "host" computers and about 20 others that support it. Via our VSAT intranet, up to 8000 different remote sites can log into our hosts (up to 1000 or so at a time). These remote sites log in with these proprietary boxes that aren't really PC's or workstations. Each of these boxes has all of the IP's of my host computers programmed in. If one of the host IP's has to be changed, or if we add a host, it can take a week or so to proprograte the new IP info to all the sites (90% of them will be done in a matter of hours by a forced download, but if someone has their box unplugged, it can take us a long time to track someone down to take care of it.) I'm guessing that their is some hardware limit or something that doesn't allow these remoted boxes to simply do a NMS lookup... I'm not sure.

We used netswitcher at work about a year ago for this sort of thing. That was on win98, but it should work.

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Can any of the network guys here give a good reason as to why a big company might choose not to implement DHCP on each of its subnets? Why fixed addressing would outweigh the benefits of DHCP?

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The only reason we use a mix of fixed and dynamic is for hosting departmental web servers. A recent project of mine was remote control of ISDN's in a radio studio. Hanging a home-made webserver off the back mean't that I could keep track of which ISDN's were dialled up and to what numbers etc. I had to use a static address for obvious reasons. Our IT department has a nifty way of keeping track of it's allocated static IP's, it's called a spreadsheet.
Combined with the fact that mortal users within the Beeb are not capable of altering their network settings.

If I remember right, Apple Menu - Location - "Building 1" or "Building 2". Just make sure the settings are right for each in the control panal.

Oh wait, sorry, Windows 2000. Not sure offhand of any program that would do this. Though, with Win2k, you shouldn't have to reboot after changing the network. If it's asking, 2000 is damaged. If it's not asking and you are rebooting anyhow, just disable and reenable the network connection for the same effect, unless it's domain related as to why you are rebooting.

It does ask me... but I am changing the the IP, subnet AND gateway...

I have noticed that at home on my LAN, it doesnt ask me to reboot...

I understand the need to have certain servers on fixed IP addresses, of course. I just meant for client PCs that tend to get disconnected and switched around a lot, fixed adressing is usually a lot of trouble.

I found it rather interesting to have all the desktop machines on static rather than dynamic (indeed, my laptop uses DHCP so I can use it both at home and at work without reconfiguration) but after talking to the broadcast IT guys it turns out that all the machines in my area (BBC Manchester) all operate on the same subnet. I'm told it makes evil-doers easier to track.

In such a situation, you should be using DHCP to assign unchanging IP addresses to computers based on their MAC addresses. That way, you're still using DHCP to facilitate easy changing, but you always keep the same IP addresses in the situations where you need a specific IP address.