DHCP migration between different server languages

Edoardo Casella Windows Server

Sometime happen (hopefully) that you have to dismiss old and not supported Operating System (aka Windows 2003) and during the process you need to move the DHCP server.

If both server have the same language, you will not face any problem but, if source and target server are in different languages (sometime, for no good reasons, IT technicians install the OS in their own language instead of English), the import process will fail to match the correspondent DHCP class.

The error raise is: Error while importing class “Default BOOTP Class”. This class conflicts with the existing class “Default BOOTP Class”.

Here the manual workaround to solve this.

Step 1: Export

From the source and the target server, export the defined DHCP classes:

NETSH DHCP SERVER DUMP > SourceDHCPDump.txt
NETSH DHCP SERVER DUMP > TargetDHCPDump.txt

Step 2: Comparison

At this point we need to compare the exported class

As you can see, we have the same classes but with different language description. This is the main reason of the import fails.

Step 3: Translation

We need to configure the source server with the same DHCP classes language as the target server. Manually we will remove the German classes and we will replace all of them with the English version. Copy and Paste command do most of the job, we have to modify the NETSH command to meet our needs:

#Remove
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] DELETE Class "Standardrouting- und RAS-Klasse" "Benutzerklasse RAS-Clients" 525241532e4d6963726f736f6674 0 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] DELETE Class "Standard BOOTP-Klasse" "Benutzerklasse BOOTP-Clients" 424f4f54502e4d6963726f736f6674 0 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] DELETE Class "Microsoft Windows 2000-Optionen" "Herstellerspezifische Optionen fr Microsoft Windows 2000-Clients" 4d53465420352e30 1 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] DELETE Class "Microsoft Windows 98-Optionen" "Herstellerspezifische Optionen fr Microsoft Windows 98-Clients" 4d534654203938 1 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] DELETE Class "Microsoft-Optionen" "Herstellerspezifische Optionen fr Microsoft Windows 98- und Windows 2000-Clients" 4d534654 1 b

#Add
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] ADD Class "Default Routing and Remote Access Class" "User class for remote access clients" 525241532e4d6963726f736f6674 0 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] ADD Class "Default BOOTP Class" "User class for BOOTP Clients" 424f4f54502e4d6963726f736f6674 0 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] ADD Class "Microsoft Windows 2000 Options" "Microsoft vendor-specific options for Windows 2000 Clients" 4d53465420352e30 1 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] ADD Class "Microsoft Windows 98 Options" "Microsoft vendor-specific options for Windows 98 Clients" 4d534654203938 1 b
NETSH Dhcp Server [DHCP IP] ADD Class "Microsoft Options" "Microsoft vendor-specific options applicable to Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Clients" 4d534654 1 b

Step 4: Export and Import

At this point we have the old DHCP server with the translated clesses so we can safely export it end import to the new (English) DHCP server:

On source server:

NETSH DHCP SERVER EXPORT C:\Temp\TranslatedDHCPDB.txt ALL

On destination server:

NETSH DHCP SERVER IMPORT C:\Temp\TranslatedDHCPDB.txt ALL

Job Done!

Hoper this will help to decommission old fashion DHCP servers.