Assiging IP addresses to clients...

CyberiaWiFi · Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 27 Location: Chicago, IL

This might sound odd, but here goes... We love firspot so far, however some windows clients, usually with a certain common brand of wifi card, have issues getting a valid ip from firspot's dhcp server. Change out the nic card and boom, youve got an ip...so i played around and started specifing ips for some clients, and firspot seemed to work great them. Really simple and fast. Here's the od benifit i tested over and over again. We have a DS3 (Yeah, your all jealous i know) and the most we could suck out of it for a wireless client (Getting its ip from firstpot's dhcp server) was about 3 megs, but when i specified ips for those same clients, from the same location, we can get the full 10 i have the router throttled to. Very kewl huh? One thing i like about firstpot is that it lets me specify ips for our regular, monthly unlimited preffered custoemrs, and still can handout ips for the casual use it for an hour or so guests to our cafe. They still all get great speed and reliability. Just fyi: We've been running firstspot on a rather cheap PC with xp professional and it hasnt locked, seiezed or crashed in 3 1/2 weeks! Never rebooted it or anything. now thats allot more stable than other apps i have tested. good work guys!
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alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

This is strange. The version 2.0 you are using has no throttling code in it. And setting IP instead of letting FirstSpot to assign an IP should not affect FirstSpot performance at all.

Also, when your client PC cannot get an IP, sometimes it is due to timeout. Just renew it again (using ipconfig/renew) or sometimes reboot the client will solve the issue. Moreover, you should double-check the client with command ipconfig to make sure it is really failed (sometimes ipconfig/renew will give you an error, but when you use ipconfig to double-check the IP setting, it actually obtains the IP correctly)
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CyberiaWiFi · Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 27 Location: Chicago, IL

Especially with some NIC cards from linksys and netgear it will just not get a ip from the dchp server./ As for the speed issue, i am not sure why, but have tested it back to back thru dslreports.com and in fact we get a 25% speed increase by specifying ips to the clients. Makes no sense to me as to why though.
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Brads · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 4

With out having to map IP to Macs how do you assign the DHCP scope? I am using the Centralized Network Topology (Scenario 3) trial version 2.1.
I do not see where I can set the DHCP scope. Help

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

The FirstSpot DHCP Server will hand out IP automatically based on the Multiple Network Segments settings.

For Senerio 3 Centralized Topology, since the client DHCP request will reach FirstSpot DHCP Server via "DHCP Relay", the FirstSpot DHCP Server will know which segment that the client request comes from. Therefore, it will be able to hand out the correct IP.
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Brads · Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 4

Ok, so what you are saying is that if the AP is 10.18.225.10, and the fspot server is 10.1.5.15 then the ip to the client will be 10.18.225.xx?

If this is the case how can you tell fspot which addresses to hand out in the 10.18.225.xx range? Does it assume that it can hand out addresses for the entire range?

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

Yes, that is correct. FirstSpot DHCP Server will hand out the "entire" range of IP in 10.18.225.x to the client.

(see http://www.patronsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151 for more discussion on DHCP Relay)
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