PIX - DHCPD Default Gateway/Routing issue

[jhaggett]

Hi,

I have 3 3COM layer 3 switches. All are routing fine. For one of the branches, we have a PIX 501. The pix is acting as a DHCP server. My problem is, I can't get traffic to flow to the router at all. The default gateway is the PIX, and I am unable to change this. I have added route statements on the pix, but, I think the pix won't send information back on the interface in which it was recieved.

Anyone have any ideas how I can change the default route for the DHCPD that is issued to clients to point to the router instead of the pix?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[scoclayton]

The PIX DHCP server service is meant to be a *very* basic DHCP service for small/home offices. The design was meant for customers who deployed a 501 in a very simple network where the PIX would be the default gateway. As a result, there is no option in the PIX DHCP server configuration to change the default gateway that is sent to the DHCP clients that get an address from the PIX. The PIX will always populate this field with the address assigned to the interface where the DHCP address was served from. In your case, you will probably need to look into another design that utilizes the PIX as the default gateway or switch to a more full featured DHCP server such as Microsoft's. If this is a big problem for you, I owuld suggest talking with your local Cisco account team and ask them to raise an enhancement request on your behalf.

I'm sure this is not what you were hoping to hear but I hope it gives you a little background into why things are as they are. Good luck and let me know if you have any other questions with this.

Scott

[jhaggett]

Hi Scott,

What I ended up doing was allowing the PIX to continue issue DHCP, but, on the client, I added an additional default gateway to point to the router and everything worked great.

Thanks for your response.