Is it better or worse to have IP reservation?

[digital10]

So I came up with an idea out of my head that reserving IP's in my Netgear router will make the connection more solid and stable. I don't think I really see any benefit or harm. Can anyone else elaborate when and when not you need to reserve the IP?

I am also using Netgear Orbi and I am reserving an IP for the satellite because I think that will make the network more stable since it will not randomly select a new IP and my devices will get confused connecting between each AP.

am I wrong, right, or it doesn't matter?

 

[bbunge]

So I came up with an idea out of my head that reserving IP's in my Netgear router will make the connection more solid and stable. I don't think I really see any benefit or harm. Can anyone else elaborate when and when not you need to reserve the IP?

I am also using Netgear Orbi and I am reserving an IP for the satellite because I think that will make the network more stable since it will not randomly select a new IP and my devices will get confused connecting between each AP.

am I wrong, right, or it doesn't matter?

In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
However, network devices, such as servers, printers and NAS should have a reserved or static IP address. Clients, IoT devices and your Orbi satellite will do just fine obtaining IP addresses via DHCP. And once they have connected and have settled in the addresses will seldom change.

 

[ColinTaylor]

It shouldn't really matter for most devices. The only things that usually need a reservation are devices that are addressed by IP rather than their name. That would be something like a port forwarding rule on the router that points to a device on your LAN.

Whether a DHCP client's IP address is reserved or not would have no effect on 'stability'. The process by which a client renews its lease from DHCP is much the same in either case.

 

[cooloutac]

I don't know about netgear orbi, but the only other reason besides what bbunge said, is if you using mac filtering, or maybe special policy routing, and dont' want ip's to change to bind to the mac of the device used in some firewall rules or something like that which I think is what Colin refers to.

Reserving too many ip's might have the opposite affect and actually make these consumer routers more unstable.

 

[dosborne]

I like to use IP reservation as a backup in case I have to reset a device. I prefer a static IP configured on the client (save a ms for it to "ask" for one) but if for some reason the static options fails to run (an update or reset for example), if it defaults back to DHCP then the reservation will issue the same IP so it makes it easier to "find" on the network.

Completely optional, just the way *I* like to do it.

 

[cooloutac]

I like to use IP reservation as a backup in case I have to reset a device. I prefer a static IP configured on the client (save a ms for it to "ask" for one) but if for some reason the static options fails to run (an update or reset for example), if it defaults back to DHCP then the reservation will issue the same IP so it makes it easier to "find" on the network.

Completely optional, just the way *I* like to do it.

well that definitely saves any problems on the router. I use to always do it that way too. Still makes it easier when specifying a dns address sometimes. There can be the very rare case of it not giving back the same ip on occasion if it defaulted to dhcp but other then it being a more tedious if you have a lot clients it should be no big deal. Shouldn't affect your network either way.

I'll tell you one thing, thats the better way to do it for security purposes.