I just set up a wireless repeater bridge. My primary router's IP address is 192.168.1.1. I had a friend guide me over the phone on setting this up. He told me to set my bridge's IP address to 192.168.2.2. I did this and everything works exactly as expected. Except in order to log in to the bridge I have to connect to the network and then manually change my device's IP address to something within the 192.168.2.x subnet. My question is, does the bridge's IP address need to stay outside of the primary router's DHCP range but in the same 192.168.1.x subnet? Or is everything OK the way I have it set?
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1 Answer
It's usually fine to assign a static IP address within the DHCP server's range, especially if you're the network administrator. Good DHCP servers try to ping the address to make sure it's free just before they Offer it, and good clients try to ARP the address to make sure it's free just before they Request it.
On many DHCP servers, including those built into many home gateway products, you can assign static IP mappings within the advanced configuration of the DHCP service. Just tell it the Ethernet hardware MAC address of the product you want to give a static mapping to, and the IO address you want to give it. Then you can leave that device set to get its own address via DHCP, but it will always get the same address.
Also, you might be able to configure your DHCP server's DHCP address pool to be smaller than your NAT gateway's private LAN address subnet. So your NAT could translate for the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet (addresses 192.168.1.[2-254]), but your DHCP server only serves out 192.168.1.[2-200], leaving addresses 201-254 for static usage.
It's also perfectly fine to leave the repeater on a different IP subnet than the one you're using as your NAT/DHCP range. One could argue that making it harder to connect to has a security advantage.