ipaq 4700 wifi question; DHCP vs. Static help please

[Peter Traugot]

I have a static settup at home, but obviously want to surf out of the house, which means DHCP.

However, it seems that I can't set my prefered AP at home as Static and have seporate settings for all the DHCP APs.

I have to go back to the network card config and manually switch between Static and DHCP.

Does this sound right? Am I missing something.

The software is far from intuitive.

Thanks for your help.

[ctmagnus]

Is there a particular reason you want/need to use static IPs? Once you go DHCP, you'll likely never go back. It's just so convenient.

[Peter Traugot]

basically as an added security point. But since I'm locking down by MAC address these days, I can probably switch it to DHCP

[Sven Johannsen]

I'm missing something. You can set up your home network as essentially static by configuring your router to limit the DHCP scope. Only hand out addresses between 100 and 105 for instance, or just between 100 and 101. You can set all your current hosts up statically, including your AP(s). Those only have IP addresses for management anyway and you would prefer to have them static, as you would servers and network printers. The PPC can be set up DHCP and will be handed one of the 1, or 2 or 5 addresses you put in the router DHCP pool, and it will work fine on the outside.

It's not an either or proposition, just don't assign static IP that are also in the DHCP scope. You can continue to use MAC filtering on the wireless stuff to help in security, as well as whatever encryption you stuff will support.

[Peter Traugot]

Oh.

I was under the impression it WAS either/or.

Well, thats good news. Thanks for the info!

[Sven Johannsen]

Check your router configs. Normally the DHCP page lists a starting address for DHCP to hand out and then a number of users to support. You can make it 1 if you want.