a bit of techy shopping help please?

[Don Trogette]

I could do with a router that does static and dynamic IP addresses, does anyone know of one? I have a couple of things that really need to not have the IP address changing every time there's a power cut but all the other stuff in the house doesn't matter so much...
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[Cymber]

I'm sure that all made perfect sense to someone who speaks the language, but that person is not me!!

Hope you get an answer soon.

[Slaine]

There's lots of answers to this. It depends what you're trying to achieve.

For most cases you shouldn't care what IP address is being used by a device because you will use a dynamic naming system such as Multicast DNS (also known as Bonjour or Rendezvous) or NMB. Windows only supports NMB out of the box, but you get Bonjour when you install iTunes (or just install Bonjour for Windows). All network printers and most other things such as NAS boxes support Bonjour, as do all Macs and most current Linux distros.

If it's for port forwarding so that you can get direct access to certain internal boxes and your router is running NAT (which is nearly always the case), then most current routers will either let you bind IP addresses to particular MAC addresses so that device always gets the same IP when it renews the DHCP lease or bind ports directly to a MAC address so the port is forwarded correctly even if the IP address changes. This is becoming more common, especially on routers which support UPnP ( Universal Plug'n'Play) which is an automated form of this used by many online games, BitTorrent clients etc. Almost all routers will let you set up static DHCP leases, but it's often quite confusing and well hidden.

As a last resort you can always set a static IP on the device itself, but beware of things breaking in interesting and difficult to track down ways if you change router, change your internal IP range, pick an address within the scope of your DHCP server or move a mobile device onto another network (wifi hotspot etc). I would normally only consider this for a full fledged server (on which I would be running DHCP, DNS as well as other services and DHCP would be turned off on the router).

So in order of preference:
1 stay dynamic and use Bonjour and UPnP
2 set up static leases on your router
3 set static IP addresses on individual devices

[Kia Kaha]

The PS3 has to have a static IP address and so we have Netgear DGN2000. Seems to work fine with us all on it at once and we have 3 PS3s, 2 Wiis, 3 laptops and 2 PCs connected to it. Obviously not *all* using the connection at the same time but at weekends there are often all 5 of us on it at the same time.

HTH