Fixed IP addresses for printers or DHCP???

[David Wood]

Anyone any experience or advice using fixed or dynamic IP addressing for
printers. Logically you would use dynamic to allow best use of addresses,
zero administration and less chance of ip conflicts. But I am advised
generally to use fixed!
Of course you would need fixed addresses for Unix or some applications.
There are also apparently issues using DDNS instead of WINS (with HP
Jetdirect?)

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

Unless you can guarantee your host name system will work in a crisis I
think you're better off with fixed IPs. There are also just too many
screens in printer admin tools that expect IP addresses as input.

It's also worth putting a label on each printer with it's IP address,
that way if someone phones you from another building with a printer
problem you can just ask for the IP number instead of trying to guess
which printer it is.

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

To add to what Gerry said, most DHCP servers have a way of reserving an IP
address for a specific device - MAC Address. When you create a DHCP
reservation, the DHCP server will always give the specified IP address to
the device with the associated MAC address and will not lease that address
to any other device.

So, you can have both "fixed" IP addresses and central management via DHCP.