Here's a hopefully simple question regarding a change in network addressing methods. If I have a host with an assigned DHCP address [in this explicit example, 192.168.1.12] and I want to change this machine to a *static* IP address of 192.168.1.50, should I need to do anything on the router in order to have this "just work"?

I tried this yesterday with a (Mint) Linux box, and after the change I was unable to get an IP address of any kind on the Mint system using a static address. I then reverted to DHCP on the host and tried [repeatedly, even via full reboots] and the system categorically refused to acquire an IP address.

Ultimately the issue was solved by reverting to DHCP and rebooting my Draytek 2860...

So my question is:

Does the DHCP cache/table in a 2860 get "upset" if a known MAC address tries to change from dynamic to static addressing, or even to change IP addresses? This all seems a bit weird...

Thanks in advance!!!

Not strictly an answer to your question but I approach that by leaving the host on dhcp and adding it's MAC address to the IP bind table. Hence it always gets the same "static" address.

Thank you, I think that might be worth trying.

The only reason that I was looking to move away from DHCP was from the fact that what I actually want to set up is IP Aliasing on that host... I want have a series of key services on the machine, including BIND9 DNS, plus a few different Apache-hosted packages, so my idea was to set up a series of IP Aliases, i.e.

192.168.1.50 BIND9 DNS
192.168.1.51 ownCloud Server
192.168.1.52 ProcMail Mail Delivery Agent [MDA]
192.168.1.53 Dovecot IMAP/POP3 [MTA]
192.168.1.54 PHPMyAdmin MySQL Database Administration Portal
and so on...

I guess that there might be other [perhaps better] ways of doing all this, but I like the idea of functionally separating my traffic to different IP addresses, because then I can experiment with some packet level network analysis too, but without having to change any configurations...

I shall keep tinkering...

Thanks again for responding - let's see if anyone else can chip in...

So,

A bit more tinkering has taught me to stop seeking complicated solutions to simple problems...

it turns out that the "Networking" applet in the Mint Cinnamon menu actually allows me to set up multiple, different network profiles for each of the adapters the hardware has detected, then switch between them instantaneously. So I've just been able to switch between my two target states [DHCP and static] using that technique. Sadly it isn't the entire problem solved [let's be honest, that really would be too easy - now all i have to figure out is how to add IP alias addresses to this second wired profile and I will be all the way there...

I think the good news here is that this demonstrated ability to switch addressing schemes using the utility [instead of the hand hack of the config files] suggests that the host and the Draytek can play nice when asked properly. And it was that potential compatibility issue that was my primary concern...

Thanks all