how can I setup a lab in my workplace without affect our domain

[ceez]

hello everyone.

i would figure that I would know how to do this, but I dont want to create a new domain on a lab server and have it plugged into our production domain and cause havoc.

what I am trying to accomplish is to setup 3 pc's on it's own lab domain (lab.local), yet I will still need network access to this lab domain. I do not want to plug it into our network because our dhcp server will begin to assign IP's and one of these lab pc's will be a server running dhcp with a complete different IP range.

I am thinking about a vlan switch that I can plug into our network and assign those ports the an IP in the range of the lab server, yet how will they get out to the web. It's all fine and dandy that all 3 pc's can talk in their own vlan segregated from our production domain but there's no net access.. Would it work by assigning the lab pc's the dns address of our production DHCP server?

thank you for the help.

[allen2]

If you want to play safe, you should physically separate both networks and set up a router between so you can choose what to route.

As you described the wanted setup, you DON'T want both dhcp to answer whenever a computer will ask for an ip. And by design dhcp will answer to a computer if it is on same physical lan or on the same logical vlan.

So with the switch thingy, you'll still need to setup a router to allow some of the traffic to go to your production network.

But this is the bad way, any error on your test network could make your production network to fall (like a loop).

[ceez]

thanks for the reply.

I dont think it will work with our setup, we have an mpls network and just one drop that goes to our cisco router connected to our hp procurve. there would no way of feeding a second line with a diff ip address to a diff cisco router.

the best scenario would be to get a DSL line dropped in and have it completely seperate.

[ceez]

what if i reserve a small pool of ip addreses from our dhcp server and make this lab a child domain within our root domain?

would that cause any problems?

I am so willing to just try it but dont want to cause havoc on our production environment...that would suck!

[allen2]

It should work if your child domain doesn't go crazy.

When you set up a test domain, it can happen a lot that you won't be able to foresee and that's the reason for 2 physically independent networks. If anything goes wrong on the test network, it won't affect the production.