Static IP address

My router assigns addresses from 192.168.1.2 to 254. I want to give my wireless printer a static address and I know that this has to be outside that range - do I simply go for 255 or is there some other rule of thumb?

.255 will not work because it is the broadcast address for the 192.168.1.0/24 network.

Simply choose one high up in the range, it will *never* conflict, you'll be OK.

I would go for .200 or something easily memorable.

If you like you could go into your router and adjust the range down to .2-199 for example so it would never conflict, but I strongly doubt you'd ever plug in 199 devices anyway to make it conflict.

Edited by Pipexer (Tue 21-Apr-15 20:21:24)

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

.255 will not work because it is the broadcast address for the 192.168.1.0/24 network.

Simply choose one high up in the range, it will *never* conflict, you'll be OK.

Assuming the router uses sequential allocations. It's not exactly a sensible bit of advice though and just leaves the potential for a world of pain later.

The BETTER advice was to reduce the size of the DHCP pool your router gives out - say give out between .2 and .150 - that'd still be huge amounts and leave you a shedload for other stuff.

In reply to a post by therioman:

Assuming the router uses sequential allocations. It's not exactly a sensible bit of advice though and just leaves the potential for a world of pain later.

If the router doesn't use sequential allocations, it is garbage and should be thrown in the bin.

And even if it did give them out randomly it would still be a 1 in 240 chance (shall we say) per every week or so it would conflict, very unlikely.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

In reply to a post by therioman:

Assuming the router uses sequential allocations. It's not exactly a sensible bit of advice though and just leaves the potential for a world of pain later.

If the router doesn't use sequential allocations, it is garbage and should be thrown in the bin.

And even if it did give them out randomly it would still be a 1 in 240 chance (shall we say) per every week or so it would conflict, very unlikely.

Whereas you could have a 0% chance by just doing it properly once...

It's a BT HH5.

It's easy to change the DHCP server range to give you some spare addresses to allocate statically.

I've delved into the hub's advanced settings and set the range up to 150. So I need to give the printer 155, for example? It's been allocated 71 when the hub re-set. I read an article that suggested a static address and extended lease time to solve the issue of printers not responding. I'm getting there, I think.

Yes

In reply to a post by GeoffB:

It's a BT HH5.

Don't quote me on this, as I haven't got one but from memory you disable DHCP, then you can edit/reduce the size of the range, and then re-enable it.