Last night, I decided I would read a couple of documents and migrate the old Windows NT 4.0 Server over to the new Dell computer with Windows Small Business Server 2003. It turns out the process is quite involved and after the third long document in tiny print, my eyes were getting bleary and time was swiftly flying by. There's a long checklist of things to make sure are in place before doing the big switch and there are many warnings that if the software is not updated, or if any of the settings are wrong or if you don't follow the directions exactly, the migration will fail!

One of the checkpoints is to disable DHCP on the original server. That was pretty easy. I kept reading and started downloading the ADMT utility. ADMT, of course, is the Active Directory Migration Tool. It's a pretty big program and as it was downloading, I kept reading. Then I noticed the time and I had to get home. I decided to just pick up where I left of next time I came in.

But I forgot one thing.

I got a frantic call the next day saying the internet connection was lost. Three people had been called and no one knew what the problem was. Of course, when I was called, I knew exactly what I had forgotten: the DHCP server.

So tonight, I went in quietly and re-enabled the DHCP service until I could finish the migration to the new server. Of course, the other computers magically connected to the internet again. And I upped the DHCP lease timeout from 3 days to 30 days so computers will keep their DHCP-generated IP addresses longer.