Yes, I did read your answer. You said:
Quote:

It's not an option because it has been said that these machines should use static configuration, so that they are not dependent on the DHCP server to be online.



Well, after the lease has been give out for the first time there is *no* dependancy on a DHCP server being online at all. If someone has told you that there is then they don't understand DHCP.

The only dependancy is that if a lease cannot be renewed it will eventually expire and the address will be given up.

The lease is renewed half-way through the leased period, and if the DHCP server is off-line at this time the client will continue to attempt to renew the lease periodically.

This means that if the lease period is set at the default (7 days) and your DHCP server fails you have ~3.5 days to get it working again before leases will start to expire. If you think you might have an outage of more than 3.5 days set your lease to something longer, say 30 days. That will give you two weeks to get your server up and running again.

The only other time that you will have an issue if the DHCP server is unavailable and where the client has explicitly released the lease, or where it has moved to a new subnet and the DHCP data it has (IP address / gateway) are not valid. Neither of these situations apply to "static" devices.

So maybe you still cannot use DHCP because you cannot get support for it and I can imagine how frustrating that is, but the next time someone implies that the DHCP server has to be up for DHCP clients to work you can put them straight.

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