Question about private IP addresses

Talic

Is it a good security practice to change the default private IP addresses in your router? Since NAT is supposed to cover up the actual IP address of your internal computers and keep it secure from the internet.

Also is there a way to keep a IP address static in the router settings? I tried to "reserve" a address to one of my machines but DHCP seems to ignore it and give it a random IP address. I want to keep DHCP on for my other machines but I'm not sure how to make my main machine to use just the one I want.

dynamik

Talic wrote:

Is it a good security practice to change the default private IP addresses in your router? Since NAT is supposed to cover up the actual IP address of your internal computers and keep it secure from the internet.

If your router is compromised from the outside, they'll be able to see what your settings are anyway, so I don't think this would help a great deal. Any internal host would obviously know how you've set things up.

Talic wrote:

Also is there a way to keep a IP address static in the router settings? I tried to "reserve" a address to one of my machines but DHCP seems to ignore it and give it a random IP address. I want to keep DHCP on for my other machines but I'm not sure how to make my main machine to use just the one I want.

You can either use reservations, which requires you to provide a MAC address > IP pair, or you can just configure a static IP that is outside of your DHCP IP address pool. If you setup a reservation, you will need to release and renew the IP addresses to get the address you reserved. Unless you've changed your DHCP lease duration, your machine won't check in with the DHCP server for days, and the DHCP server can't simply push out an update to the client.