Please help wth a 'changeip' error

Question

Hey
We have just recently been turfed out of our office and relocated to different building. Our IT dept has informed us we need to change our servers IP address as they now need that for something else.
I have done as much research as I can and looked through countless discussion posts and manuals and have come to the conclusion that I have to use a command in terminal called 'changeip' reading furthur I believe I must also add 'sudo' the the start of this so that I am logged in as root.
our current IP address is : 172.16.64.10
and we need to change it to: 172.16.32.5
now as far as im aware my command should therefore be :
sudo changeip /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 172.16.64.10 172.16.32.5
This doesn't seem to work however. I do get a prompt for a password then I get the error:
'DNS doesn't not have a valid name for IP address 172.16.32.5
If DNS is not repaired, errors will be logged and functions will not work properly'
now I have just found a page saying that with servers running 10.4.6 or over (which we are) I must now "now use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) with the command."
I found this at :
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303495
To be honest im not exactly sure what this means, but the differences I see is that they include'testserver.example.com testserver2.example.com' after the IP addresses in the command.
In DNS on our server I believe our dominan name is:
medusa.filton.ac.uk
My question is: does anyone out there think I have to enter this in my command or change something in DNS first so that my command functions.
Im basically looking for a guide to getting this IP swapped so I can start getting my macs back online and seeing the server again. From what i have read it should be reletivly simple or running the correct command and then going to network prefs and swapping them manually and restarting.
This as I feared is not the case
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Ryan

Answer 1

I have checked with the IT bobs downsatirs and they do confirm that the IP does indeed have forward and reverse DNS lookups
That's a bit murky, so let's confirm, shall we?
Open Terminal and try the following:
dig medusa.filton.ac.uk
dig -x 172.16.32.5
dig -x 172.16.64.10
If it's as they say, the replies should be, in order as above:
172.16.32.5
medusa.filton.ac.uk
medusa.filton.ac.uk
Although the last answer is not entirely necessary to the exercise; they may have already re-assigned the old IP address. If it's different, note it and use it in the changeip command, like so:
changeip [(directory|-)] old-ip new-ip [old-hostname new-hostname]
Which reminds me of a few things:
1) I got this out of the following manual:
<http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/CommandLine_v10.4_2ndEd.pdf>
and it bears reading through every mention of the changeip command. (As well as, if so equipped, the code itself; see p. 66.) See p. 67 for a walkthrough of the procedure.
2) The first argument ("directory") is important and you need to make sure it's correct for your network config.
3) I've only used the command a few times myself, but I remember having to try it a few different ways, especially for the "directory" argument.
- Marc