How to manually assign and Reserve a LAN IP address?
I have gone through Technical Support, and they could not help me on this. (TLDR: I had, and still might someday get, a connectivity problem that is due to two of my devices having the same IP address.)
I am migrating my home network from another provider (Verizon FIOS most recently) due to a cross-country move. I have a Linux PC that I use as a Web server on my intranet only, and so I use a fixed IP address for it (ex: 192.168.1.234), and this address appears in URLs used by other devices and PCs on my network. The Linux PC has this address "hard-wired" internally, and does not take it from the network.
My problem was that the Spectrum App did not recognize my Linux PC for management purposes, claiming not to know its IP address. It still worked locally and on the Internet, so I didn't worry about it at first. But as I added devices, my Linux PC became very unreliable on the network, and one other device (a Chromecast) was inaccessible. On looking closer, I saw that the Chromecast had been assigned an IP address that matched my Linux machine. Power cycling the Router/Modem was no help: this IP didn't change.
On my previous providers, I was able to manually configure router tables to ensure that it would not assign this address to any other device. On Spectrum, I am finding that I can only "Reserve" an address if I let the network assign it itself first, to some random address. Technical Support confirmed this, in terms of what I could do over the Spectrum management app, and they could not change this for me either.
What I ended up doing, myself, was removing the Chromecast device from the wired LAN, resetting it to factory defaults, and setting it up again on WiFi. The router assigned a different IP address, and I then Reserved this address to make sure it stays out of my way. But this is only a temporary solution, since at any time a new device might get assigned to overlay my Linux IP address again.
So: Is there any way that I can declare a fixed IP address at my Spectrum router that I myself provide and Reserve? Or is there a way to remove an address, or a range, from the pool that the router will use to assign to new devices?
I have also reported this as a Spectrum App shortcoming. I cannot bring myself to believe that it is inherent in the router itself, based on the weight of Internet tradition and standards that have been in effect for so long.
Answers
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Hello and welcome to the Spectrum Community.
At this time if you lease a router from us the access to the settings is limited. What you can access via the My Spectrum app is all that you can do. If you wish to have more access to the router's settings you would need to purchase your own router instead of leasing one from us.
-Tyleen
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Stupid question: why not enable DHCP on the Linux machine's LAN adapter so it'll show up in DHCP, and then reserve whatever dynamic assignment it gets from the dynamic pool and ride with it?
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Edit: once you do that, maybe you can then edit the IP address under Manage Existing IP Reservations but, either way, i'd ride with a dynamic rez instead of a manual embedding in order to avert conflicts.
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