How to Provide DHCP services to all Clients across the Network

The Network is designed and configured in Cisco Packet Tracer version 5.3.0.0088
The Network feeds DHCP services to all the Clients of Network across all Routers.

The Network also has the Web server which feeds Web services to all the Clients across all Routers, but this is not a part of this post. It will be covered later.

In this post my focus is just on configuring DHCP server.

As shown above in the picture the network has four access points that are connected to the Routers and then the Routers are connected to one another, making a loop. While one access point is connected to the switch and we also have a DHCP server which is directly connected to that switch and then the switch is connected to the Router. Our clients(Laptops) are connected(wireless) to their respective access points.

Configuring the Network:

Step 1:
Configure the Routers. You can configure through CLI or trough the user interface, it's your choice. Make sure you have given different IP schemes to all the routers.

Step 2:
Once all routers are configured and all the ports turns green, apply RIP(Routing Information Protocol) to the Routers, to allow data communication and to feed DHCP services to the clients across all routers.

Step 3:
Click the DHCP server and provide IP and subnet mask(IP scheme must be different). Now as shown in the Picture we have five different sub-networks(five access points) so create five pools with Default gateway, Start IP address, Subnet Mask and Max Number of Users.
The default gateway IP is the one which you had given to the port of the router that is connected to the access point. Start IP address will be the network address(for ex: 40.0.0.0). Subnet Mask is the default mask for the IP class that you are using and Max Number of Users means the number of clients to provide IP's, give the value 256.

Step 4:
Now give the helper address to the ports of the Routers that are between path of the clients. The helper-address is the IP address of DHCP server. To provide helper-address, click the router and go to the CLI tab. Go to that port number(for ex: if you have the port number se1/0 type int se1/0). Then type ip helper-address 100.0.0.0(Note: this will be the IP address of your DHCP server). Give that address to all the ports one by one. The figure below will help you understand on what ports you have to give the helper-address, and what do I mean by the path.

Step 5:
Finally we are finished configuring the DHCP server. Now check on the Laptops one by one, you will see that the DHCP request successful message and the laptops are obtaining the IP address from the DHCP server.