75ZT Community

In reference to my post here about using a Network Player to stream music from a NAS drive via a laptop interface, and some of the drop out issues I've been having, I'm wondering if the sudden overall lack of communication, I occasionally get may be due to our router having a dynamic address which is being randomly re-assigned?

I'm not sure what the protocol for such re-assignment is - I've always known it'll get a new address if it's powered down for example, but yesterday, I was downloading a lot of files via FTP (about 10 mins worth) and it re-assigned halfway through!

So, I'm thinking that a static address is probably best!

There's two questions I therefore now have:-

1) Are there any disadvantages to static addresses?
2) What address should I use? (do I simply make the current dynamic one static?)

Looking forward to any advice!

Your external IP is assigned by your service provider. for that to be static you will have to pay and they will assign an address from a different range from DHPC.
If you are talking about making your internal addresses static. Just use the current range and enter them manually, it makes no difference what the range is 10.x.x.x 192.x.x.x or whatever.

I'm pretty sure I just mean the router IP, and it's affect on the local network rather than connecting to the Internet? If there's something I have to pay for, I'll not bother!

On your local side, each time to start a machine that requires an IP it will be dynamically assigned by the router. Therefore it is likely that each device will get a different IP each time it is started. This can confuse some operations. In your network CP, Configure IPv4 using the currently assigned details manually. i.e. if DHPC = IP 192.168.1.65 subnet mask 255.255.255.0 Router 192.168.1.254 then use those figures set manually.
As an aside it is virtually impossible for dhcp on the local side to be re-assigned without either restarting the device or the router. It may be that your router dropped out momentarily, in which case it would have got a new IP from provider and may have reassigned each device on the network with a new local address.

Cheers Mick! I'll get re-assigning!

Usually, the router is what assigns the local network IP addresses, and it's own address is fixed. I've only seen a problem with printers who's IP addresses can change at power up. That said, I've never seen them change unless a power down and restart occurs. So I'm not sure why your routers local IP address would ever change. You aren't using your external IP address via loopback are you?

The routers self assigned NAT address will always remain the same regardless of any other changes. Unless you log into the router and change the NAT range.
I run two Macs and an iPad along with a network printer, it's arbitrary which address is assigned to each device at startup. The printer requires a static address when used as an IP printer as the Macs remember it's previous address and if it changes they have difficulty finding it. This can be overcome by using the Bonjour protocol, which ignores IPs.