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Best practice for manually assigning IP addresses?

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Bitrudeuk

Regular Contributor
I'm just setting up an AX-86U running Merlin 386.4 and wanted to check what the best practice is for manually assigning IP addresses, so that I can select specific IP's in the VPN Director section.

Assuming the DHCP pool is 2 to 254, should I be using 254 and below? Or can I just use 99 to 95 and counting, as I currently have manually assigned? Or does it not really matter?

The ultimate aim is to carve out the wife's work laptop and my Nvidia Shield from the VPN I have set up on the router, selecting them manually in the VPN Director.

Many thanks in advance
 
Depends what you mean by manually assigning.

If you are talking about a reservation on the router's DHCP page, then you should use IP addresses within the pool.

If you are talking about a static IP configured on the device's network interface, then you should use IP addresses outside the pool (as you are not using DHCP here).
 
Assuming the DHCP pool is 2 to 254, should I be using 254 and below? Or can I just use 99 to 95 and counting, as I currently have manually assigned? Or does it not really matter?
Assuming that you're talking about reservations in DHCP (as per RMerlin's post) aka "Manually Assigned IP around the DHCP list", then it doesn't matter what addresses you use from the pool. As far as the router is concerned there's no difference between using 254 vs. 99.
 
Well, this is one time when the OP used the correct terminology and I understood just what he wants to do.

Yes, your approach should work well. The manually assigned addresses do not need to be in a consecutive block unless VPN director requires them to be consecutive.
 
Many thanks everyone for the quick responses.

I was indeed talking about manually reserving/assigning IP's from the DHCP list, so it seems I have free reign on which ones to choose :)

Well, this is one time when the OP used the correct terminology and I understood just what he wants to do.

Yes, your approach should work well. The manually assigned addresses do not need to be in a consecutive block unless VPN director requires them to be consecutive.

Thanks bbunge, I have that scary amount of knowledge in IT that let's me think I know what I am doing, only for me to tinker and make the original issue even worse! I'm chuffed that you were able to understand what I meant from my explanation, as I often struggle to explain the underlying issue I am facing!

Cheers
 
If you going the route of assigning from DHCP, you should consider installing @Jack Yaz DHCP extension:


Quite a bit more flexible than the built in one.
You can install it via amtm.
 
If you going the route of assigning from DHCP, you should consider installing @Jack Yaz DHCP extension:

Quite a bit more flexible than the built in one. You can install it via amtm.

Thank you, though from reading the link, it seems a bit excessive to manually adjust 3 or 4 clients IP addresses, or have I misunderstood it's use?

I am assigning one address for my NAS, so that I can add it in the NAS firewall and then just 3 others, as it stands, to take them off the VPN client installed on the router. Hopefully even I can't muck this up doing it manually????

I fear it will all start to go wrong, when I start tinkering with the VPN Director and consider assigning myself a DDNS for the router... Wish me luck! I'm off to do some more reading on those subjects!
 
LOL!
Well, I've always interpreted "Manually Assigned IP around the DHCP list" as... not within the DHCP list for some reason. Seems I've been wrong this whole time. Sigh...
FWIW, I have "Manually Assigned IPs" that are not in my DHCP scope and have not had any issues with those assignments. I take it that's not a recommended setup but seems to work. I'll have to revisit.
 
LOL!
Well, I've always interpreted "Manually Assigned IP around the DHCP list" as... not within the DHCP list for some reason. Seems I've been wrong this whole time. Sigh...
FWIW, I have "Manually Assigned IPs" that are not in my DHCP scope and have not had any issues with those assignments. I take it that's not a recommended setup but seems to work. I'll have to revisit.

This has been discussed previously in quite some depth (just can't locate the thread at the moment).

The conclusion from actual experimentation indicates that it doesn't matter from the perspective of DNSMasq's DHCP server whether you assign/reserve an IP from inside or outside the DHCP range. In either case, DNSMasq will respect it (and it was the latter that had ppl concerned, especially *me*, since many years ago that wasn't the case).

Personally, I always assign them outside the DHCP range because it's typically quite limited (e.g., x.x.x.200-239), and so I just don't want reservations consuming it.

But if you take all those kinds of personal considerations and preferences out of the equation, in the end, it doesn't matter. Do whatever you find works for you.
 
I think I read that thread when researching how to do this, but there didn't seem to be a definitive answer about if you are using the range, which ones should you use? It seems the answer to both questions is ultimately, as you say, it doesn't matter, it's just personal preference!
 
Well, I've always interpreted "Manually Assigned IP around the DHCP list" as... not within the DHCP list for some reason.
As @eibgrad said this has been discussed at length before. Ultimately "around the DHCP list" is just a poorly translated and confusing phrase. The original Chinese just says: "DHCP list for manually specifying IPs (max limit: 128)"
 
Yeah, the wording should be "Manually Assigned IP within the DHCP list" to clear that up from a "best practices" point of view. I do see the other threads and discussions and as noted by @eibgrad it works fine in or out of the scope which is my observation as well. I'll keep my setup as it is.
 
Good idea, i've adjusted the thread title for future reference and searches!
Sorry, I meant the wording on the Asus screens. I'd suggest to leave your post title as originally intended as that's the text people would search on (as I did).
 
The conclusion from actual experimentation indicates that it doesn't matter from the perspective of DNSMasq's DHCP server whether you assign/reserve an IP from inside or outside the DHCP range. In either case, DNSMasq will respect it (and it was the latter that had ppl concerned, especially *me*, since many years ago that wasn't the case).

Personally, I always assign them outside the DHCP range because it's typically quite limited (e.g., x.x.x.200-239), and so I just don't want reservations consuming it.
From a technical level, with dnsmasq, it doesn't matter indeed. However from a best practice point of view (and possibly enforced by some other DHCP servers), reservations should be within the pool because a reservation (also called a static lease) is STILL a lease, and all leases are expected to come from a pool.

This used to be documented by Microsoft on Technet as well, where they stated that as a best practice, reservations are expected to be from within a pool.
 
Yeah, the wording should be "Manually Assigned IP within the DHCP list" to clear that
Unfortunately the English translation of Asuswrt still remains one of its weak spots (all development is done in Taiwan, so Chinese is their native language), despite Asus having made great improvements over the years. I wish they hired a native English speaker to handle all the English translations.
 
Unfortunately the English translation of Asuswrt still remains one of its weak spots (all development is done in Taiwan, so Chinese is their native language), despite Asus having made great improvements over the years. I wish they hired a native English speaker to handle all the English translations.
Native English speaker? Eh? From where? English in its many forms is attempted all over the world. I am living 150 miles from where I grew up and I can understand a Welshman better than some around here....
 
Volunteer @Jack Yaz for the translation job ... ;) here is his modified DHCP Server tab wording ...

Manually-Assigned-IP-Jack.png


I use both static assignments at device level - where the IP's are purposely NOT in the DHCP scope ... and then Manually Assigned IP's for all devices which, at device level, are left to obtain their IP addresses from the DHCP server automagically.

Several older IoT devices seem to fair better when left with DHCP automatic settings - so serving up the same IP to such a device with Manual Assignment opens up the ability to redirect those clients etc.
 
Native English speaker? Eh? From where? English in its many forms is attempted all over the world. I am living 150 miles from where I grew up and I can understand a Welshman better than some around here....
To be fair, there are many members of this forum whose mother tongue or native language is not English, which sometimes means that they might not be fluent when speaking it, or might not have the necessary writing proficiency to clearly & coherently describe/explain a situation using what is essentially their 2nd or 3rd language, particularly when it comes to more technically-oriented matters, as the posts in this forum are supposed to be.

Story Time:

I once worked for a company that manufactures & sells electronic medical equipment & related software applications worldwide. All the information for a new product user's manual, reference guide, technical specs, etc. was first written in English by 2 technical writers on staff with the initial input & support (when called upon as needed) from some of the H/W & S/W engineers involved in the development of the product. In addition, all text strings used within the application's GUI were further reviewed & revised as needed to make sure they conformed to a set of pre-established standards for "user-friendliness, consistency & cohesiveness" (don't ask - it's a much longer story)

After the English version of each document & GUI text strings were finalized & approved, they were all sent overseas to be translated to various other languages. We always had separate versions for French & Canadian French, Portuguese & Brazilian Portuguese, U.K. English & U.S. English. Once, there was a request for an Australian English version, but the budget for it was never approved (at least that's the story we got).

Anyway, sometimes we would get complaints from our user support department that some "instructions" in the user's manual were either wrong or confusing because some users were calling for help when trying to complete a particular action within the application GUI. One time I happened to check the Spanish version of one such set of instructions, and when translated back to English, one particular line said:

"Select the menu option and click the mouse to the left to kill the task."

The original English version that we provided said:

"Select the menu option and click the left mouse button to execute the task."
 
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