From the course: Windows Server 2019: DHCP and DNS

Components of a DHCP database - Windows Server Tutorial

From the course: Windows Server 2019: DHCP and DNS

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Components of a DHCP database

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- [Instructor] The DHCP database is a dynamic database and a very resilient database containing data that relates to scopes, address leases and reservations. The database also contains a data file that stores both the DHCP configuration information along with the least data for clients who have list their IP address from that the DHCP server. So let's take a quick look at the database. And there's just a couple quick things we can do with it. Here I'm in dc-1, my DHCP server and the server manager we're going to up to the Tools menu and select the DHCP. This will take us into the DHCP administrator. In the DHCP administrator, I'm going to go ahead and right click on dc-1 and go to its properties. 'Cause I want to show you that we have a couple things here. We have a database path which points to where the database is located by default, and a backup path, which you'll notice is the exact same path except for there's a backup directory inside of that path. Now in both cases, we could click on Browse and move the database or its backup to a different location. But for right now let's actually go to this path and let's take a look and see what we find. So I'm just going to go into Explorer, go into my C drive, Windows, and then we have System 32. And inside there is dhcp. So this is the directory that we were pointing to in the DHCP administrator. And there's a lot of files here. And if you've ever worked with any standard database, you know that these shouldn't look that unusual. And that still holds true as far as the functionality, it works like a standard database engine. So what are some of the significant files here? Well, we have dhcp.mdb, which is the actual database file. We have tmp.edb down here near the bottom and that's a temporary file that is used as a swap file during routine database index maintenance operations, okay. Again, remember I said this was a resilient database. There's a lot of things that it doesn't take care of itself. We have a whole bunch of j50 log files. We have j50 itself and then we've got two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and then we even have j50res one and two. Well these are your log files and the j50 res files are your reserved log files. And that has to do with making sure that if your hard drive were to fail that you would go ahead and have some space left to make the last few changes to the database before you shut the database down. And then we also have a checkpoint file right? We have j50.chk. These are all standard files when it comes to databases. And I'm not going to go to details on the functionality you can learn about that if you aren't familiar with how it works. This is the database and this is where we find everything. Now we also mentioned that inside this directory, we have a backup directory. And one thing that's important to know is that DHCP automatically backs up to that directory once an hour without you doing anything. Alright so again, very resilient. Let's jump back over to the DHCP administrator 'cause I want to show you that besides the automatic backups, if I right click on dc-1, you have the ability to do a manual backup. Okay, I could select to backup and then of course it defaults to that backup directory but you could choose to put it anywhere you want. And if you know that you have a corruption to your database and you want to recover it, you could right click on dc-1 and restore. And it defaults to restoring from the backup directory but again, if you know you backed it up somewhere else you could restore from there. Now the only thing I want to tell you when it comes to the backing up the DHCP database is it keep in mind that the backup directory by default is in the same location as the database. So if something happens that corrupt that location, it's all going to be corrupted. So you may want to consider moving the backup somewhere else, or at least having some kind of routine maintenance that you do manually where you do like a manual backup. You come in here and do it manually and send it to somewhere else. And even beyond that, please make sure that when you're doing your server backup maintenance, that you make sure to backup whatever directory it is that has the backup of your DHCP database.

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