[clarkgoble]

Hopefully I can get answer to this here. Otherwise I'll repost it to the OSX forum.

Anyway, I'm using Internet Sharing with Jaguar. (I was holding off upgrading to Panther for a while to see what the bugs were) This is an old 400 MHz G4 so I don't use it much and put it to work basically as a NAT server.

Anyway it works fine (other than having to manually turn it back on if I reboot) for all my systems using DHCP. The thing is that I'd like to have fixed IP addresses for all these other machines. i.e. the ethernet card in my Mac is set to 90.0.0.1 which is the "gateway" I'd like to set say my PC to 90.0.0.5 and have it *stay* that way.

Yet whenever I do that, it seems like it doesn't connect to the Mac's DHCP server properly. Anyone know what is going on?

[ghporter]

Ok. Let's define terms. DHCP stands for "dynamic host control protocol," and that "dynamic" part means that the DHCP server receives special requests from the clients and assigns them IP addresses temporarily. The oposite of DHCP is fixed addresses. You need to make sure that your fixed, manually assigned addresses are not in the range that the DHCP server uses, or you will wind up with two different devices using the same address-a recipe for disaster.

The settings for Internet Sharing should give you a starting address and number of clients allowed (or something like that) for the DHCP server. Let's say it starts at 90.0.0.100 and allows 50 clients. That means that every address between 90.0.0.100 and 90.0.0.149 is reserved for use by the DHCP server. Your manual addresses need to be either between 90.0.0.0 and 90.0.0.99 or from 90.0.0.150 up.

Finally, when you manually assign an address to a computer, it never contacts the DHCP server, so the server doesn't know anything about it.

Does that help?

[clarkgoble]

Well, I guess what I'm saying is that natd ought to allow 90.0.0.1 to be accessed as a gateway. That's not happening but did work when I had a nat server running on a PC.

Also Apple's DHCP server in OSX doesn't let you specify the number of addresses. (Unfortunately)

[Scarpa]

It sounds like you want to eliminate DHCP altogether.

Since you are doing that, make sure you provide all the relevant TCP/IP configuration details for all machines that you set manually. Also, try to use static IP addresses that are outside the DHCP scope (the pool of addresses available for DHCP).

Know that a DHCP server hands out more than just an IP address. At a minumum you will need to configure the IP address, gateway, subnet mask and DNS server entries. If any one of those settings is incorrect and/or missing the host will not be able to access the net correctly.