I have a large event which will I will be delivering Wireless Hotspots to @ 500 people over 5 days.
People will be sold service for 2 hrs. 4 hours, 1 day, 3 days and 5 days.
With basically 6 AP's all on same lan or not? serving wireless clients.
Any suggestions as to best way to limit/maximize DHCP addresses. I'd like to have @ 200 always available.
If people are purchasing 2 hours time. I'd like to be able to free up that used IP for the next user over a 4 day period.
I've considered adding a vlan on Hotspot box/router.
Or running each AP in router mode?
Additionaly. By changing lease times down to @ 2 hours.
How does that affect the overhead on CPU.
And what is proper setting for time to store leases on Hard drive?
Hope someone can make sense of this.
Thanks

do you want to use public addresses for your clients?..

if not - then 10.0.0.0/8 pool should be quite enough

2 hour lease time shouldn't be a problem.

Look at it in terms of operations per second. DHCP clients renegotiate the lease after half the lease has expired. For 2 hour leases, you will get (3600 seconds / 500 requests) =~ 7 seconds between requests. That is workable, but longer leases would be better.

Personally I don't store DHCP leases on disk at all. Router down is a rare event for me, and I like to minimize disk write activity. Even on router down events there aren't usually too many DHCP conflicts since the router will verify the requested lease is available before confirming it, and each client will - usually, at least on all main operating systems - request the lease it last had. Only new clients joining in just after a router down event would typically have a chance of duplicate IP conflicts.

2 hour lease time shouldn't be a problem.

Look at it in terms of operations per second. DHCP clients renegotiate the lease after half the lease has expired. For 2 hour leases, you will get (3600 seconds / 500 requests) =~ 7 seconds between requests. That is workable, but longer leases would be better.

Personally I don't store DHCP leases on disk at all. Router down is a rare event for me, and I like to minimize disk write activity. Even on router down events there aren't usually too many DHCP conflicts since the router will verify the requested lease is available before confirming it, and each client will - usually, at least on all main operating systems - request the lease it last had. Only new clients joining in just after a router down event would typically have a chance of duplicate IP conflicts.

Thanks, both you guys!

Not having been there yet (500 +/- potential users). That's comforting to know. I didn't want to have customers want addresses already taken conflicts, etc..
So, nope to public IP's.
One PC with RouterOS4.11 doing NATing

Use at least a /22 and you should be fine.

Use at least a /22 and you should be fine.

Little over a month ago we installed 11 AP's in hotels resort covering camp and a marina. All AP's had a DHCP relay on RB1100 in server room which was using DHCP server to issue C-class /22 addresses. We reserved the first range for static IP addresses for AP's and the rest was given dynamically by the DHCP. We never run out of addresses and lease time was set to 5 hours so that there will be a fresh supply of addresses if needed.

Now we will try to set up a A-class address space for future expansions of the network. When in doubt use a A-class address space.

Use at least a /22 and you should be fine.

Little over a month ago we installed 11 AP's in hotels resort covering camp and a marina. All AP's had a DHCP relay on RB1100 in server room which was using DHCP server to issue C-class /22 addresses. We reserved the first range for static IP addresses for AP's and the rest was given dynamically by the DHCP. We never run out of addresses and lease time was set to 5 hours so that there will be a fresh supply of addresses if needed.

Now we will try to set up a A-class address space for future expansions of the network. When in doubt use a A-class address space.