Hi folks,

Before I hop right into the issue I am having, let me tell you how my network is setup and give you some background information:

I have a wireless LAN setup here at home. It is compossed 5 computers in all. Three of those computers use dynamic IP addressing (DHCP) and two of them have static IP addresses. On my router, I have the range of 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.19 setup for DHCP. The two static machines occupy the IPs of 192.168.1.136 and the other 192.168.1.140.

Just recently I have started hosting a game server (HLDS) on my PC which requires the machine its running on to have a static internal IP address. So I setup the PC's TCP / IP properties with a static IP (192.168.1.140), forwarded the required ports on the router and everything ran great.

Then, I decided I wanted to run the server on a seprate computer from which I play the game on. So I then setup a static IP for another machine of mine (192.168.1.136), which I plan to use as the game server.

This is where the problem occurs:

The system that I setup the new static IP on procedes to connect to my wireless LAN but gets stuck in the "Acquiring Network Address" stage. A scary sounding error message then pops up on the other system with the static IP (which is already connected to the LAN and working great) saying "There is an IP conflict on the network".

Funny thing is, the computer which is stuck in the "Acquiring Network Address" stage can access the internet! Also, if both machines are disconnected from the LAN, the first one that attempts to connect, connects completly. The second one that attempts to connect gets stuck in the "Acquiring Network Address" stage. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do the PCs them selves, but TCP / IP or router settings.

I know I should just shud'dap and use DHCP on the machine that isn't hosting, but I am curious to know why this won't work. I have also just started studying for my Network+ certification and this will be good hands-on-work for me!

So. If anyone has any tips, advice or even a whole solution I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me out here.

Thanks.

Hi Will it work if you set the router to use static IP addreses and no DHCP? just for testing purpose it might be worth a try. Do you need the other PC to use DHCP?

I could set all computers as static and disable DHCP. The other computers don't have to be DHCP. I'll give it a shot and let you know how it goes!

Another alternative is to use "reserved" addresses if your router supports them. It is effectively a static DHCP address.

In plain English - the IP you get now will be the same IP you get everytime.