XP laptop trying to grab Gateway computer's IP address
 

Hello.

I'm sure this happens more than people would like, but I couldn't find anything with a quick Google search, so I ended up here. I probably didn't know what to search for really. :)

A traveling user comes aboard & tries to get his laptop setup on our network. Our gateway computer is set to 192.168.1.1 & somehow, the traveling user's laptop ends up trying to grab that IP address. The network flickers on / off while this is happening. All the other employees start to panic & the call comes in that, "We're down *again*." Anyways, we figure out that it has to do something with this traveling guys laptop, so we go take a look. We notice the IP address is set to our Gateway's IP (though, I didn't notice if it was set to receive an IP via DHCP or not), then quickly assign it a usable IP address & the network magically comes back to normal again.

The only question then is, "How would we stop this from happening again?"


Thanks in ADVANCE!

Well, that is the problem right now. If it was set to use DHCP, then the issue is on your side; if it was set for static IP, then there is nothing you can really do about it.

It seems more likely that the person had that set as his static IP, since it would be strange for the DHCP server to give it out. You could check your DHCP leases to be sure.

Good point & thanks for your brain on this one. The more & more I think about it, he must have unintentionally manually assigned it that IP address forgetting the rest of the numbers, he was "supposed to be using 192.168.1.179.