Offsider Blog: How to make your Domain Added DHCP servers offer to run the "DHCP Post-Install Configuration Wizard" on demand.

Nathan Pearce

So, perhaps you administrate a domain, and the group for delegating access to DHCP Administrators doesn't exist. But how, I have installed DHCP on Domain Controllers, so why isn't it there, I hear you say? Let's help you fix that!

Plenty of places around the internet will offer guidance as to if you should install DHCP on a Domain Controller or not, and I personally think its the right place for DHCP, but, nowadays, you can't just go allowing anyone onto your Domain Controller. So you are going to want to delegate that access to a select group of "Non-Domain Admin" Admin accounts.. right?

Well, If the admins of yesteryear installed DHCP, and forgot to run through that lovely "Complete DHCP configuration" wizard helpfully tucked away in an unimportant warning flag... You might wonder, how in the heck can I get access to such a lovely wizard myself?

Is it a Powershell script I can run? Can I run this from the DHCP management console! NO... says Microsoft.

NB: If you build out DHCP on member servers, and DO run the DHCP configuration Post-Install Wizard, it adds the groups that the wizard creates to the LOCAL USER GROUPS. Not to the domain. So you'll have to run it at each server you run it on.

Irony: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
- Merriam Webster Dictionary.

So, in searching and searching for an answer, I found all these complaints from people who stated "I have run this wizard, but it won't stop telling me to run it in Server Manager!".

• The instructions when you had that problem, suggested to go to the registry, specifically to:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ServerManager\Roles\12

• And then to set the DWORD value for "ConfigurationState" to the value "2"

Well, that's the actual opposite of what we want. We WANT to run the wizard, and nothing will prompt us to!

So, what if we try the inverse? Set it to presumably the state before "Done"... would we get the result we desire?

As it happens, yes!

So, you can use the following script in Powershell, or you can manually edit the Registry value to "1"

Set-ItemProperty –Path registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ServerManager\Roles\12 –Name ConfigurationState –Value 1

I hope this blog helps someone out there. If it does, feel free to drop me a line at DHCP Blog Post to say thanks!

This is hopefully the first of many Blog posts where as I get better and better at what I do, I leave behind notes to help others.