DHCP not providing IP's to stations!

Question

Hi, im trying to figure this out for days but cant make it work!
i've set up a MacOSX Server 10.5, its working fine for print and file sharing, i wanted it alos to control the IP address for all the computers connected to same network so in near future i start using Open Directory, and i dont want to provide manual IP's.
in OSX Server Admin Application, i set the DHCP providing it with starting ip's, end ip's, mask, router, dns, and in System Preferences/Network/Ethernet i also set same IP for the server, same mask, router, dns as set in DHCP, start the DHCP i see nothing changes in computer client, they keep generating the Bonjour IP's, or if i put a normal router in the network they immidiatly get the IP's from the router, so why from the Router and not from OSX Server?
in the Admin page of DHCP seetings, in Log, it says that machine (with MAC addresses) trying to obtain DHCP address.. if it knows theres a computer trying to get its IP from the server, why its not providing it??
and if i have a router and a server in same network, how do i make computers get the ip's from the server and not from router?
is there a step by step manual out there to "correctly" configure DHCP? and then Open Directory?
i've manage to run DNS correctly, cuz i tested pinging to both ip and server name and both gave correct results...
Thanks

Answer 1

You may have already done this, but it isn't clear from the post, so it's worth checking...
i also set same IP for the server, same mask, router, dns as set in DHCP
I assume that you mean you set a different IP address, right?
You cannot set your server to have a static IP address that's within the DHCP range.
For example, if you're using 192.168.1.x/255.255.255.0 as your network/subnet mask then you might have your router at 192.168.1.1 and your server at .2. You could then define the DHCP range as something like 192.168.1.101 - 192.168.1.200.
That would give you 100 dynamic IP addresses in the subnet that do not conflict with manually-configured devices such as the router, server, etc.
if i have a router and a server in same network, how do i make computers get the ip's from the server and not from router?
You turn off the DHCP server in the router. While it is possible to have multiple DHCP servers in a subnet, it is vastly more complicated and not generally recommended.