Static leases outside of DHCP-range?

[Gleb]

Static lease is not the same as Static address.

So I should've said 'static leases'. The question remains.

In Almond+ you tell what range you want to DHCP server to give out, so if you want to use Static Leases, they need to be included in that range.

The notion of range is only applicable to dynamic addresses leases so putting static leases there is forced and counterintuitive. I get that the Almond's dhcp server configuration syntax may be limited but "it is what it is" is no justification in itself.

[eldaria]

So I should've said 'static leases'. The question remains.
The notion of range is applicable only to dynamic addresses so putting static leases there is forced and counterintuitive. I get that the Almond's dhcp server configuration syntax may be limited but this is no justification in itself.

Not really.
In a static lease setup with DHCP you still get other information such as Network Mask, gateway, dns servers, boottp, etc. sent to the client, something you do not get in a Static address setup where you would have to set all those things manually on the client. And in some cases this is not even possible or very difficult, for example when you have a computer that boots over the network.

So in most cases you want to make sure that a certain device always get the same IP even if they been gone from the network a longer time, but do not want or can't even set them on the client manually.
In this case you use DHCP leases.

[eldaria]

ok, just to give you an example.

I have an SIP phone, I also have a Wireless printer/scanner.

Both of these have a Web interface, so I need to know that they are always on the same IP.
However it is difficult to configure them to use a static IP with all the settings that come with it, so in this case I use a static lease.

I also have a Linux server that I can connect to in various ways, and although it is easy to configure the IP settings on it, why would I when I have a DHCP server on the network that can provide all the settings?

[LGNilsson]

Here are some examples of the advantages of using static DHCP reservation - http://lifehacker.com/5822605/how-to-set-up-dhcp-reservations-so-you-never-have-to-check-an-ip-address-again

The reason why they're inside the DHCP range is simple, as eldaria explained, there are devices that are auto configured when added to a network, like printers, media streamers, IP cameras, light bulbs, tablets, phones etc. and many of these don't have an option to set a static IP address. Being able to lock them to that specific IP address is really handy and you can technically force them to use a different IP address from the router this way, something you couldn't do any other way on a device that doesn't allow you to set the IP address manually. It's also easier to manage the connected devices on the network and you'll never have an IP address conflicts this way. Someone might not know the DHCP lease range when they set a static IP address on a device and it can cause IP conflicts on the network.
Static DHCP reservations is the recommended way of giving a device a static IP address these days and there really are no advantages of setting a static IP address on the device side.

[Gleb]

Thanks for explaining why it's useful to have static DHCP leases/reservations/whatever. I agree and I do use them.
And that is why I stumbled upon an inconvenience of current way of configuring DHCP. I'm used to be able to put dynamic addresses in a range, say 192.168.0.100-199 and static leases in another one, say 192.168.1-9. I don't want dynamic addresses in the 1-99 range. That's what dd-wrt and isc-dhcpd allow me to do. The dynamic addresses pool is the only range I see myself care about. It's surprising to be asked for a range but not that one. It's bad UI when a perfectly valid configuration is rejected because static allocations don't fall inside the dynamic DHCP range -- they can actually be anywhere in the subnet.

[LGNilsson]

Well, complain to OpenWRT, we're simply following the way they're doing it. Every router I've used over the past 13 years or so have had a different way of doing something or the other, it's usually quite easy to adapt, if one wants too.
That said, it doesn't mean we won't be improving on things, but the base platform has some limitations we can't get away from.

[Gleb]

That's understandable. It's the "doesn't make sense" assertion from eldaria that seemed weird. And it's still bad UI (UX? something user-centric) in my opinion. openwrt might not care about that but Almond web UI is too nice to have such issues

[Fire69]

I was updating/adding my static leases just now, and to my surprise I got this message!!

Code: [Select]

Number of Static Lease Entries shall not exceed 20
Wut??  WTF??

I went to OpenWRT and could add extra leases without any problems, so why not in NutsOS?

[LGNilsson]

I've notified the software team about this and reported it as a bug.

[Fire69]

Thanks

Any indication about when an update is coming, a week, a month, this year?

[LGNilsson]

Weeks, we've decided to split the next release as the new Wi-Fi drivers caused some problems with the range extender mode and it's taking us longer to fix this than we'd hoped for, so the next firmware won't have the new Wi-Fi drivers, but it'll fix hopefully most of the other issues people are having, such as the garbled data over the WAN port etc.