How to Enable and Configure MAC address Filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2

How to Enable and Configure MAC address Filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2

In this post, we’ll learn the steps to enable and configure MAC address Filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2. In the previous posts, we have learned the steps to install and configure DHCP server in Windows Server 2012 R2. Network Administrators can filter the assigning of IP addresses from the DHCP server on the basis of MAC addresses. To prevent the network from the security threat this low-level security method plays a vital and important role. On DHCP server, both allow and deny list can be configured separately. After configuring both the lists DHCP server will start assigning the IP addresses to the clients on the basis of MAC address filtering.

Steps to enable and configure MAC address filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2

1. Open DHCP, under IPv4 expand Filters. Here, we can see two options. The first option is “Allow” and the another option is of “Deny”. The Allow filter is used to assign IP addresses to those MAC addresses only which are added in the allow list. Whereas, the Deny filter is used to restrict the assigning of IP addresses to those MAC addresses which are in the deny list i.e. DHCP Server would not assign IP Address to the clients that are part of the Deny Filter. For this practical, we will configure the Deny Filter. Right click on Deny and then click on New Filter.

How to configure Scope of DHCP Server

2. To enable and configure MAC address Filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2, on New Filter console, enter the MAC address of the client that will not receive IP address from the DHCP server. Click on Add to add the MAC address in the Deny list. Here, for this practical, the MAC address of our client is “00-0C-29-EB-1C-5E“. Click on Close to close the console.

Steps to promote Domain Controller

3. Again on DHCP console, click on the Deny filter. We can see that the MAC address we have entered on the previous console is showing in the Deny list. Right click on Deny and then click on Enable to enable the deny filter.

4. Now go to the client computer whose MAC address is added to the Deny list. Open command prompt and type command “ipconfig /release” to release the IP address that was previously assigned. Now run the command “ipconfig /renew” to renew the lease of the IP address from the DHCP server. It shows an error while renewing the lease from the DHCP server. The client computer is not able to renew the lease of the IP address from the DHCP server because the MAC address of this client computer is added in the Deny list of the DHCP filters.

Assign Static IP Address to Server using Command Prompt

5. Now you can right click on the Deny filter and click on Disable, it would disable the filter. Now try to run the renew command again. It would assign an IP address to the client computer.

Hope you understood the steps to enable and configure MAC address Filtering in DHCP Server 2012 R2. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions in the comment section.