[X-Newbies] IP addresses

[Vincent Cayenne]

At 1:22 PM +0100 6/15/05, Chris Walker wrote:
>I was thinking of giving myself 10.0.0.88
>which is within the range but well outside the ones likely to be used.

Don't do that. Someday you'll find yourself troubleshooting 
unexplainable problems. Go to the router's utility and look for the 
DHCP assignment range. If you gave some more information (like the 
router brand & model), perhaps someone would even chime in with the 
specifics. Or, of course, it's probably in the manual or available at 
the manufacturer site.

How do you know that it is in the range without having checked what 
that range is (and therefore being able to choose a number outside of 
same)?

>As an alternative I suppose I could give myself a fixed one in the
>192.168.x.x range which I think should work.

Don't do that. If your home network is in one subnet** and this one 
machine is placed in another, then you'll "see" none of the netwrk 
resources - not the router, not the Internet through the router, not 
any network printers, not any of the other machines... You get the 
idea.



** {Consumer-friendly generalised explanation]
There are three sets of IP address ranges that are used in home 
stuff. The one beginning with 10., one beginning with 172., and 
another beginning with 192. Apple chose to use the 10 subnetting for 
the default for their AirPort routers, while most other sellers into 
the home network market chose the 192. It absolutely does not matter 
as long as everything that expects to "see" each other within the 
home uses the same subnetting. Which is usually made transparent to 
the users by the DHCP server built into today's home routers***. A 
machine gets onto the network, asks for connectivity, and is given an 
IP address, net mask, the address of its friendly neighbourhood 
gateway and DNS servers and it all just works. Once you decide to 
assign the IP address manually, you're expected to take some 
responsibility for putting in the right numbers. At the very least, 
the IP address you choose must be consistent with the others on the 
network and not in use, and the gateway and net mask numbers must be 
the same as the others on the network.

And yes, it is more complex than that but...


*** What is simply referred to as a "router" is often, in fact, a 
multi-function network device acting as: router, switch, DHCP server, 
DHCP client, NAT device, PPPoE client, wireless access point, print 
server, etc., etc.
-- 
'tis as said. [Reality is defined by being described]