IP Address Conflict

wizzer

Can anyone help me with this problem please.

I have a Belkin Wireless G router and am using both the wireless and wired lan to connect two laptops and a printer to the internet.

Everything working fine for months - all of a sudden I cannot connect to the printer due to an IP address conflict. The printer is a Brother. I've tried manually changing the printer IP address but this doesn't seem to work.

Can anyone help please?
Thanks

cledor

Have you tried switching everything off for a few minutes then restarting in this order: Router, Printer, Computers.

wizzer

Yes that 's worked thank you!

I'm intrigued as to what's happening here and why it hasn't happened in the past.

Can you explain please? How might I avoid this? I don't tend to leave the printer on unless I'm going to use it.

Thanks

cledor

It's probably something like IP address "hijacking" . When one device stays dormant for a certain period of time its IP address is reallocated to another. Some routers (eg Netgear) allow you to set up the LAN addresses for the connected devices to avoid this. I tried doing this on a Belkin and found the nearest you can get to that is to allocate the IP addresses indefinitely, but you need to experiment with that in your router settings.

wizzer

Thanks once again.

Yes I was looking for somewhere in the Belkin router to manually allocate addresses but I couldn't see clearly where this might be.