OIT Network Switching and Routing

Retirement of BootP, DHCP, DNS, and NTP Services on ppnnet

OIT Networking & Monitoring Services
August 10 2018
Last Updated: January 20 2019

ppnnet is one of a number of special-purpose networks for certain back-of-house applications. No more than a dozen devices presently are attached to ppnnet.

On August 22 2018, OIT will retire OIT DHCP and BootP Services, OIT DNS Service (Domain Name Service), and OIT Network Time Protocol (NTP) Service on the ppnnet network.

OIT DHCP, BootP, DNS, and NTP services will remain available on the other networks where we provide those services.

And the ppnnet network will remain available, but DHCP, BootP, DNS, and NTP services will no longer be available on that network.

We are retiring those services on ppnnet because continuing to provide those services on that network in the future would incur substantial cost, and monitoring showed these services received very minimal use on that network. The ppnnet network is (by design) not routed to any other network, so providing these services to clients attached to ppnnet required maintaining services dedicated to that network. And providing the custom ppnnet view of the University's DNS data required carrying forward significant customizations to our IP address and DNS name provisioning environment.

The few devices attached to ppnnet that were configued to learn their ppnnet IP addresses via BootP or DHCP should be reconfigured to learn their IP addresses via manual configuration. (Customers associated with those devices were contacted individually in July 2018.)

Most devices attached to ppnnet that use NTP to learn time are multihomed on the Campus Data Network. If such devices are presently configured to use NTP on ppnnet, they may be reconfigured to instead use NTP on the Campus Data Network.

Monitoring showed nearly all DNS activity on ppnnet was from misconfigured or malfunctioning DNS clients. The remainder was from several DNS clients repeatedly looking up a handful of the same DNS names of specific devices on the ppnnet network; those clients may be reconfigured to use IP addresses instead of DNS names. (If the device is mulithomed on the Campus Data Network, it may also use DNS on the Campus Data Network.

The retirement of BootP, DHCP, DNS, and NTP Services on ppnnet is also in preparation for OIT's planned Retirement of the Princeton University Host Database and Related Services.


A service of OIT Network Switching and Routing
The Office of Information Technology,
Princeton University