I have two computers on my network, both connected to a router, itself connected to a cable modem (all wired). This morning I turned on the server computer (Windows XP), connected the Squeezebox to the router and installed it. But I omitted to turn on the second computer (Windows 98) before doing so. The Squeezebox is working fine, but I think it usurped the IP address of the computer that was not turned on, because with this computer I now get the message:
The system has detected a conflict for IP address 192.168.0.3 with the system having hardware address 00:0B:DB:BF:44:!E
How can I resolve this mess?
Many thanks.
The best way is to assign a fixed, static IP address to each host on your own local network. There's really no point in allocating IP addresses dynamically to your own hosts given that you have such an abundant supply of 192.168.0.xxx addresses. Dynamic assignment also makes it difficult for your hosts to find and talk to each other (unless they use Apple's Rendezvous). However, it's still useful to keep DHCP and dynamic addressing around for the benefit of guests with laptops, so you don't really want to turn it off entirely.
You can do this in several ways:
If you have a typical small home router box with DHCP support (e.g., Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, SMC), it will generally let you specify the range of addresses that it will allocate dynamically. Allocate a reasonable number of addresses in your subnet to the dynamic pool for visitors, and make static assignments to each of your own hosts that are outside the range of this pool in the remainder of the subnet. You will have to turn off DHCP and manually configure the IP address on each of your own hosts, though; if they use DHCP, they'll still get a dynamic address out of the dynamic pool.
If you have a more sophisticated DHCP server, e.g., if you're running one on a general purpose Linux, UNIX or OS X box, then you can probably enter the individual Ethernet MAC addresses of each host into the DHCP server database and assign each one a fixed IP address. When the device boots with DHCP, the server will recognize the MAC address and always assign it the same, fixed IP address. This way you avoid having to manually (re)configure all of your hosts with IP addresses. If an unknown MAC address shows up, as from a visitor's laptop, the DHCP server will fall back to giving it one out of the dynamic pool.
Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
