As I mentioned before I mod over at Abit on the networking section and I wrote up a bunch of these "HOW TO..." documents to help people learn a little more about networking and hopefully buy myself a little bit of time (instead of answering the same question 100 times).  Hopefully everyone will get some use out of them..

But i DO have a note on Network Primer Part II (found here: http://testmy.net/forumz/viewtopic.php?t=794 )

I say that it can be advantageous to manually set certain hosts on your network statically instead of using DHCP.

First of all, I recommend doing this as an "all or nothing" type of deal.  If you're going to statically assign internal hosts, do them all static and turn of DHCP on the router entirely, OR leave DHCP on.

I recently encountered someone who wanted to setup a single static internal host.  Usually this would be done using a DHCP reservation or Exclusion...but as good as the SOHO Routers are, they are also a pain in the ass because of their limited functionality (yes we all want more power).

See, if your DHCP pool has 192.168.0.2-100, and you statically assign 192.168.0.2, there is the remote possibility that the DHCP server in the router may hand out 192.,168.0.2 to another host and screw you over.  So, obviously you don't want that happening, and with *real* DHCP servers you can set that IP address aside for a particular mac/host.  The SOHO routers won't do this.

FINE.  We'll just change the scope to be 192.168.0.3-100 (0.1 being the router internal interface and 0.2 being our server).  Ok, that works, we statically set 192.168.0.2 on the server.

Then we went to setup port forwarding on the router to allow port 80 traffic through...and guess what...it wouldn't let us.  Said 192.168.0.2 was not within the DHCP scope.

That's my update on Network Primer II.  Now I just need to update the original on the other forum.

Glad someone got a kick out of it.  Like I told the boss-man, if there's anything in particular anyone wants to hear about--and I feel I know enough about it to sound halfway educated, I'll give it a shot and do a writeup.

Nice...Davey is on deck.  Welcome Aboard bro.