Can someone PLEASE help me setup static IP

I’ve searched on these boards. Can’t find any legitimate answers on a step by step guide. Please tell me like i’m a 5th grader. I honestly do not know where to change settings. I have a linksys E2500 router and a MBL 3 TB. Do i need to change my router settings to static? Or does that change the whole network to static? Can i assign just one static IP address to the router? Is that done in the dashboard? I have no background in networking nor am i network engineer. I really need some help and if someone could give me a basic step by step run down i would greatly appreciate it!!

You need to disable DHCP on the router and then setup a manual IP on the same IP range that you have for the router gateway (Your router’s IP). For example, if your router has the IP 10.0.0.1, the devices on your network should have 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3,10.0.0.4, etc or if the router has 192.168.1.1, the other devices should have 192.168.1.2, 192.168.1.3. etc. If you leave the router with the DHCP enabled and only assign one static IP, that could cause IP conflicts. Check the link below for an idea on how to do it for your PC. 

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19249/how-to-assign-a-static-ip-address-in-xp-vista-or-windows-7/

1 Like

Thanks for your response. I assigned a static IP address via dashboard using an IP address outside the routers DHCP range. Will this work? It seems to have worked and says the internet connection is good, but i’m not sure if I actually accomplished it as the settings on my router are the same. I definitely do not want to run into any IP conflicts.

One good note, setting the dashboard/MBL to static IP resolved an issue i was having with the WD2go photos app and not being able to access over 4G. 

Unfortunately my home computer is a macbook pro, but i will see what i can translate from that site.

Thank you again for your help!:smiley:

1 Like

If you want all of the devices to access each other on your local network, you need to set IP’s under the same range. If you have a Mac the link below should do it.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/22161/how-to-set-up-a-static-ip-in-mac-os-x/

1 Like

If a static IP doesn’t fix it, you should be able to reserve an IP from the router; that way MBL is set to DHCP, and your router assigns the same IP address according to the MAC address of the MBL.

I have a Linksys E3200.

When you log in to the router settings page, the first page you see should be Setup>Basic Setup. About half-way down, there’s a button called DHCP reservation. That button opens a page with two tables.

The top table shows the devices that have assigned IP addresses. You can check the “select” box then the Add Clients button. This will put them in the bottom table which is the list of clients that get the same IP address every time.

don’t forget to click Save Settings

p.s. if you use the above steps, you need to change the MBL settings back to DHCP first, from the dashboard. Then go to the router, find the MBL and add it to the Clients already reserved table

I’m going to add my 2 cents here…

On many routers it is actually safe to assign a static ip to a device outside the normal dhcp range.  In fact I usually recommend this to others.  This prevents 2 things.

  1. The device isn’t taking up a slot in the normal dhcp pool that could be used for another device

  2. You are not likely to hit a scenario where another device got the ip the device is statically set to before it can ask for it (which results in a ip conflict)

 Depending on the router though you may or may not be able to port forward to it.  DHCP reservation is another good option but behavior of how the router handles it varies…  In many cases it works fine though.

Note: A standard subnet range on a router allows up to 253 devices removing the x.x.x.0, x.x.x.1, and x.x.x.255 ips for special purposes and the one for the router UI.

Note: Some brands (like Linksys) intentionally start their addressing up at .50 rather than at .2 so you can use .2-.49 for static assignment. :stuck_out_tongue: