[NCLUG] permanent IP addresses on a home LAN?

[Benson Chow]

Don't overlook the cheesy way out: hardcode IP addresses of machines that 
you normally ssh to.  At least that's what I did with my Cisco 675 when 
it was handling DHCP and has the same problem.  DHCPds should 
automatically avoid 'used' addresses if they're implemented correctly - 
I've seen a lot of implementations from scanning the subnet to simply 
checking the IP for a response before assignment.

Currently I have my Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT to handle DHCP.  If you 
do have a "hackable" router (in a perfect world, all of them should 
be...), consider switching firmware to one that does handle static 
assignment of IP by MAC address - www.openwrt.org is a good place to 
start as they seem to want to support as many routers as possible.

DD-WRT uses dnsmasq to handle dhcp whose configuration file is slightly 
different than the typical dhcpd client.  And even though the DD-WRT 
supports semistatic DHCP, I still hardcode many of my boxes 
(specifically, just about all of my *n*x boxes, always want to connect to 
them at some point by address :-)

-bc

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, S. Luke Jones wrote:

> Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:25:59 -0700
> From: S. Luke Jones <slukejones at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group <nclug at nclug.org>
> To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group <nclug at nclug.org>
> Subject: [NCLUG] permanent IP addresses on a home LAN?
> 
> I once had a 10/100Base-T switch + router that let me configure its
> DHCP server to assign IP addresses by MAC address. I replaced 10*BaseT
> with 802.3g or whatever you call WiFi and could never go back, but my
> wireless router doesn't let me configure the DHCP server that way.
>
> And I miss it. In particular, I miss it whenever we have a power
> outage and machines come back online in nondeterministic order, and
> get IP addresses at random, and all my .ssh/known_hosts lines become
> wrong, and I have to think a lot harder before I do things like rsync
> -av --delete . 192.168.2.101:work
>
> Could anyone recommend a way -- assuming there even is a one -- of
> overcoming the lack in my Wireless router and getting dynamically
> assigned IP addresses to be less dynamic and more static-ish?
>
> (No, it doesn't have anything to do with Linux, although one of the
> machines in question does run Linux.)
>

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