Any help with IP addresses?

[longcanadianwinter]

I am fairly sure this is a simple question that I am a little embarrassed to ask, but after a couple of hours of reading the guides and searching these forums for similar topics I am no closer to finding an answer - so here goes...

I have been having instability with my system the last 12 hours and it seems to be related to IP address conflict. Transmission won't start up and the latest is that my AFP shares, which worked fine yesterday, have now disappeared even though I can still reach my freeNAS drives through FTP. I checked the error logs and see the consistent message "<MAC address> is using my IP address 192.168.0.1 on epair1b!" So it would seem fairly obvious that one or more services are not running because of an IP address conflict.

My instincts tell me that the solution is likely to be assigning static IP addresses within my network for both freeNAS and my PC's, etc. However I am having a very hard time finding any documentations or tutorials on how to achieve this. Help?

Thanks

 

[Yatti420]

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page

What hardware are you using?

 

[longcanadianwinter]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I've read through the guide pretty closely. When I look at my network summary I see that the default route is 192.168.0.1 which is the same as my Cisco router. I presume I would want to change that .... do I need to be configuring a static route? I am sure the information is in there it's just that I think I am not appreciating what applies to me and what doesn't. Lots of it seems to be for more advanced activities and does not address this directly.

My h/w is
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
8GB DDR2 PC5300 RAM
Intel NIC

I realize that ideally I should have more RAM. I recently upgraded the NIC from RealTek as I know they have issues.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

 

[joeschmuck]

You didn't read very closely then. Let me guide you directly to the topic called Interfaces: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Interfaces

No, the route remains your router, you only need to change the IP Address and Subnet. If you had static IP's in your current network I would have assumed you knew this.

 

[longcanadianwinter]

I looked at this section a couple of times but concluded after a couple of read throughs that this wasn't something a person needed to do unless they were changing the default setup. After all, doesn't the boot process configure the interface and that's how it hands you the GUI IP address? My thinking was that this was if I needed to get more advanced and since I am in the early stages of playing I didn't want to change this.

Anyway I'm sorry to be dumb, but is there help on what I need to do here? I can see that it explains how to set up the interface but I am still lacking guidance on what values to use for my situation. How would I get information on what all the fields mean and how to best select the ranges I need? Does that make sense?

For clarity I have no static IPs in my current network, my question was whether I need to create them to create predictability for freeNAS.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

 

[joeschmuck]

We are here to help and sometime give someone a hard time. It's not always intentional. If you have any further questions that you need a little help with, post away.

As for dropping in an IP address, you need to uncheck DHCP if it's checked, fill in the IPV4 and Subnet.

 

[longcanadianwinter]

Thanks I appreciate it. I am sure it can get a little frustrating trying to help people like myself that are blundering around in the dark. I am very willing to learn - if there is a guide I can read, a tutorial to watch I would be very happy to have someone point me to it.

So, if I understand you I should go in and manually configure this interface, unchecking the DHCP and providing the IP address I want to use? Could you tell me the preferred method of ensuring that the IPs used by FreeNAS and it's plug-ins don't conflict with those picked up by the PC's in my house? I've observed that this seems to be intermittent - which makes sense. As a PC gets switched off and releases an IP address back into the pool the conflict is resolved only to recur later when they once again conflict.

Any help appreciated. Thanks

 

[pirateghost]

This is something only you could know.

You need to understand the settings your router has. What scope the DHCP is using, and what addresses it is handing out. There is no preferred or standard method, only what is typical. You *should* use an address that is not within the scope of the DHCP services offered by your DHCP server (router), and you would probably want it to be memorable.

A lot of the home routers I have seen use something like 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254 for the DHCP scope, so if your router does this, you need to reconfigure it, because you have no addresses available to create static assignments.

I prefer to run my DHCP scope in the x.x.x.100-x.x.x.200 range, leaving network gear (switches, wifi APs, printers, etc) for the 201-254 range, and I use x.x.x.1 as my router, 2-100 for various static addresses (desktops, servers, etc). If I am using a plugin in FreeNAS, I prefer to keep it within that static IP scope in the sub-100 range.

Everyone will have their own methods and preferences though.

 

[scurrier]

Here's my preferences, if that helps your understanding. Some machines in my house, I want to give a static IP to so that I can always find them and they do not hop around on me. To do this, I use the router and tie the machine's MAC address to the IP I assign. Then, the router (which in this case serves as the DHCP server) will know not to assign anyone else these IPs because they are reserved. I find this to be the cleanest way because it lets me set everything to just use DHCP and I can manage the static IPs from a central location.

 

[longcanadianwinter]

Thanks guys, yes this is exactly what I was looking for. Appreciate it.