If you are an admin like me you are always looking for quick ways to solve tedious tasks. One such task was that of adding new IP addresses to our Windows 2003 server’s NIC (network interface card). You are probably thinking why not just use DHCP? Well for the work that I’m engaged in right now each new website we host in IIS requires it’s own SSL certificate and a shared certificate just won’t do. In case you didn’t know, each SSL certificate must have it’s own IP address, thus the need for many IPs. So to install a range of IPs to a NIC you can do the following:
Start Run ‘regedit’
navigate to
(Windows 2003)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\ Interfaces\{some-long-key}
There may be multiple keys there, but you’ll know which one it is when you open them up and look because one will have your current ip address in there.
Right click on IPAddress and click modify.
Add (or paste in) all the ips you want, one per line, save that.
Then, in the same key, be sure to also modify SubnetMask and add your subnet masks, one per line.
If you have 10 or more IPs to add I suggest opening up a spreadsheet and pasting all the IPs in one column and all the subnet masks in the column next to it so that you can copy and paste from each column respectively and you know from the start that you have an even amount of IPs to subnet masks that you are pasting in.