If you put your DHCP / static IP configuration into your ISP router, then it dies and you get a new router that’s totally different, then yes, you lose your config when you change the router (but as mentioned, that’s not the case if you pick good routers, which you can always either replace or extend your ISP router with). It’s a limitation of those particular devices, same as like you said lights have the limitation of not being able to set a static device.
However, no device will have the ability to ensure that IP is not used, so if you set the IP on a device, it will battle for that IP with other device should they be assigned the same IP.
How can this happen? Well, when you add 20 devices to your network, you might start forgetting which IPs you assigned and, since you are setting them on each device individually, you can’t just check one place to see which IPs are assigned.
Or, your router could have a DHCP with a range that assigns an IP you’ve manually assigned to a device, if the router doesn’t check that the IP is not already assigned or the other device where you set the IP manually is not online at the time, then you have an IP conflict.
So, indeed it is better to set the static IPs on the router and only resort to setting it on the device if you really have to.
Unless you’re a masochist and enjoy debugging which devices are fighting for the same IP and why
Also, yes, static IP definitely better than dynamic, with dynamic you have a moving target
Agree with @reotto, the most robust way is to set static IPs directly in the device if possible. Only use the router if the device doesn’t accept a static IP. Why? Because it removes an interdependency and a single point of failure. If you manage everything through your router and it fails, everything goes down until you have replaced it and fully restored the config. In many cases, the restoring config part is not trivial. If the static IPs are in devices, you just plug in a new router out of the box and you’re up and running again.
Keep a record of your static IPs. Adding a line to a spreadsheet for every device you add is hardly masochistic…
I run pihole with the inbuilt dhcp server. It is possible to reserve ip addresses. It is possible to do local dns. It is possible to backup the reservations.
If the pi running pihole fails I can set another up from backup in a few minuted.
@Stooovie
Honestly just do what nick does either run up a pi, running PiHole or even Adguard, let it manage your IPs (i would have a separate device for this instead of HA addons)
They can be backed up and restored with all their configs and data really easily, plus you get the added benefit of adblocking (WIN WIN). plus additional benefits those products offer.
So if you ISP based router dies, just plug a new on in give it your old gateway address and your good to go.
As you have realised some devices cant have statically assigned one and once you start getting above a certain number trying to manage them will be painful and believe me u will forget one day to update whatever thing you use for your IP management.
Most consumer based router from ISP’s have limited DHCP and DNS functionality, so if you intend to increase the number of devices you have that use IP addresses having something dedicated to the job is better.
Regarding the dynamic v static iP address, i have around 80 odd ip based devices, of those 12 are statically assigned. the rest are either DHCP reservations or dynamic. the statically assigned one are infrastructure - Switches, AP’s, Servers.
Yeah but most people don’t run that. Most people just use their ISP provided router. And for many use scenarios, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Setting up another pi in case of failure requires you to have another pi around. You might have several, but most people don’t. When everything goes down due to a failure, it’s much easier to grab a generic unmanaged switch from somewhere and simply plug it in.
And your risks of failure is an order of magnitude higher with a pi than with even the cheapest switch or router, but that’s another story
hey ! since I saw this conversation open… I didn’t do any search so I’m really sorry if I’m wrong but, I think Home assistant now have a dhcp like server where you can assigns specific ip on your smart home devices,
If it work the way I think you can ask home assistant to give ip to your smart home devices in a certain range than your routeur will give another range for you other device…
Problem there is that those provided onesfrom your ISP do not take into account growth, there are a lot of consumer based routers the ISP dish out are shocking when coming to increased numbers of IP it has to handle. We keep going on about failure rate, but in reality growth in IP usage within the home is going to be more a reason to move to another scenario that will be future proof than hardware failure and managing those then becomes harder.
Regarding comment about pi failing over the switch router, i have swapped out more isp provided routers for friends and family than PI’s i have had to replace (have a pi that is running for over 3 years running SDR without issue), not due to hardware failures but not being up to the job of increased number of clients it has to mange. The there is cost, to replace a router here in Australia is lot more than a PI
Not everybody needs growth on that front. Last time I checked, didn’t we want to attract more of the folks who aren’t necessarily in the geek/tinker/homelab crowd with HA ? I often get the feeling here in the forums that people tend to forget that a lot of home automation users don’t have hundreds of devices with 19 inch racks and routers and Pis all over their homes. A few wifi bulbs or sockets, a voice assistant or two, some Zigbee stuff (mostly Hue or similar), a tablet or old phone. And they’re happy with that with no need for growth. In the future, it’s probably going to be mostly Thread/Matter with voice assistant for a lot of people, so no need for Wifi growth either.
Not everybody needs a huge overengineered home server setup. For those of us who have one (me included), we usually know and have our own and proven ways to handle our IP ranges. For the others, just keep it simple. Static IPs on the devices. Plug them in / connect to AP, done.
Nobody said about geek/enthusiast etc, just take a normal family the number of IP address requirements can grow fairly rapidly, tablets/phones, then your Google/Amazon assistants everywhere, smart tv’s, plethora of smart appliances, games consoles, then compound by having kids friends etc. I think your underestimating requirements. And those numbers will easily tax most ISP acquired routers
Being super anal, I could not imagine not having set IPs for each device in my network.
Over years, managing this has moved from the ISP router/modem into my current setup which is ISP Modem, Orbi Mesh Router system and all IPs are controlled by AdGuards DHCP server.
I let the DHCP server hand out IPs x.x.x.1-49, but then everything static is from .100 onwards so I can easily identify new devices connected to my network.
Yes I did keep a table of devices and their IPs. I will update it. It’s just 28 devices, I can do that by hand.
I will not run Adguard or PiHole DHCP. I have bad experience with that. Even the default lists broke too much network stuff, including banking and some Apple iCloud functionality. I know I could configure that but thats just adding yet another layer of complexity, which I do not need. Thanks!
The TP-LINK router UI allows me to set current dynamically-assigned IPs as static (“staticize”?), but only 1 at a time. That’s what.i mean as manually.
