Within one week, I’ve had 2 customers (both businesses), who have called me out to fix a network issue… and in both cases, the problem was due to a network that had a mixture of dhcp-assigned IP addresses, and fixed IP addresses.

In one case, the entire network of over 15 PCs were setup by another company… All with fixed IP addresses (and no one keeping track of the IP addresses)… a recipe for disaster, but too many PCs for me to quickly switch over to DHCP in just a few minutes… I guess I’ll need to wait until the customer sees the need to change to DHCP.

The other customer was more annoying: I initially setup the 5 PCs to use DHCP… and at some point, somebody decided that two PCs were better off using a fixed IP address (but the router hadn’t been changed to remove those IP addresses from the DHCP pool…). After many network dropouts, and duplicate IP address problems, I was called out and eventually tracked down the problem… Whats really annoying, is that it was so unnecessary.