Ok, so hands up I admit I cocked this up to start, I have a laptop a NAS and a BT wireless home hub (an old white hub).

In order to try and stop the ip of the NAS changing after each reboot I switched DHCP off under the BT home hub admin pages.

Following a reboot I can no longer access the internet at all and can also as a result not log into the admin pages for the homehub.

I suspect this is as a result of the subnet of the laptop and hub being mis-matched, but I cannot see a way to either re-set the hub, or alter the ip address of the laptop to correct this and to allow me to re-enable the DHCP, then specify static ip's for the Nas and for the laprop from the non-dhcp range.

To say it's frustrating is a massive understatement – I've already tossed the homehub across the room once – suprisingly it fixed nothing 🙂

So any suggestions, please (sesible networking ones of course) ……

Connect using a Cat5 cable

Assign the NAS on MAC address and keep DHCP unless you only use your home wireless in which case set you IP as fixed

I can no longer access the internet at all

How did you post this?

Set your PC's IP address from auto to a fixed IP address (192.168.1.10), subnet mask 255.255.255.0 and gateway address 192.168.1.254. This will plonk you into the same network without the router needing to assign you an address, you can then point your browser at the router stick http://192.168.1.254 into the address bar, and fix your mistake 🙂

And just configure the DHCP to always allocate the same IP for the MAC of the NAS?

That's how I have my home network all the time: DHCP on, but set IP addresses reserved for all my 'known devices' so I can easily tell which is which in the logs.

How did you post this?

@Tiger6791 I had to go back to a really old hard wired router, the wireless one is facedown in a pool of it own blood!

@Coffeeking, can I do all this via a netsh command in a command window?

@GrahamS
As I said I cannot reset the router to use DHCP at the moment as I can't get to the ip address and the admin pages – hence the frustration.

Cheers for the help by the way gents I'm so not a network pro.

Yeah, I meant once you've sorted it 🙂

Is it a Windows laptop? If so you can do what coffeeking says via the network properties (Control Panel->Network Connections, Properties of your connection, Properties of the TCP/IP Protocol.

GrahamS – thanks – if I meet you, I may just kiss you*

*Provided it works and actually probably not as I'm sure it's not what you were aiming for 🙂

Doh!

Once you've done the temporary hardcoded IP trick (or hit the reset to manufacturer settings button as a last resort)…

Depending on the router you probably don't even need to hardcode IP to MAC if it has built in nameserver. On mine (fritz box) all you do is look at the LAN/WiFi connections, and then tell it what hostname to use for each MAC address. Then, for example you can use nas (or nas.fritz.box) to access the nas from every machine on the LAN, rather than 192.168.1.xxx or whatever. Better still, when re-installing things like Linux, it does a DHCP request and suggests all the LAN settings and host name for you 🙂 (dunno if Win7 etc. does this)