Re: Router incompatibility with Vista

Dead Paul wrote:
On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:11:35 +0000, Mark McIntyre wrote:

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:13:05 +0000, in uk.telecom.broadband , Dead
Paul <dead_paul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

(I wrote)

The answer is both yes and no. "No" there's no actual technical
requrement for it, but "yes" there's a real-world advantage for
end-users.
Depending on what apps are run the user may have to define static ip's
for port forwarding purposes.
Actually DHCP can handle this.

Firstly you can set the lease time to be long, and sometimes infinite.

So it's not quite as straight forward as the "plug in and forget"
methodology so strongly advocated here.

Secondly, by default DHCP will re-offer the same address unless its
not available. On a home network that circumstance would be highly
unlikely.

Exactly! With computers being halted and brought up everyday the odds
are you could get the wrong ip. I have seen this happen on my friends network all the time (apparently it's too hard for him to set up static
ips though he does try and set up port forwarding and as a result he finds
that certain apps wont connect). Therefore if you have a home network and
you use the routers firewall you are best off using static ips with your
port forwarding.



I think you miss-interpreted here. It is unlikely the address would be unavailable as there will rarely be more computers than addresses.

Most computer operating systems will request the last leased address when contacting the DHCP server, to provide continuity, and most DHCP servers will grant that request unless a different device has taken the address for some reason. Note that, in the case of XP, it will often switch to a MS "private" address (167...?) if it is refused the last address it had (though it takes about 50 refusals to get to that stage) rather than accept a different address.

The other problem that seems to missed in this thread is the difference between routers and computers providing DHCP services. Computers build a table of leases and hold it as a file. This allows them to reload the data at start up and continue to issue the same address to the requesting device until such time that a "new" computer requests an address and there are none in the "unused" pool.

Routers do not have a mechanism (in general) to hold the information when powered off, so will start from a clean *** at power up (possibly after re-boot also). There is no reason to lose this information otherwise, as it is needed to prevent duplicate addresses being issued.

PeeGee
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