IP address changes to mysterious number

[ivictor]

imac g5 10.4.11
connected to a netgear fvs 114

Mac is kept on at night, gets ip from dhcp from netgear. 2Wire is used in bridge mode only for dsl modem purpose.
It's fixed to get 192.168.10.2 via MAC

Situation is that every now and then it gets a mysterious ip not from Netgear and not from the IP provider (i'm pretty sure) like:
169.254.237.182 the other imac in the Lan gets the IP via dhcp/netgear.

The only way to refresh to a proper IP is to restart the mac.
This is a problem because it's used as an app server and we don't want it off.

any hints?

thanks,

v.

 

[TEG]

The 169 address is self-assigned. I would think your overloading the Netgear router's DHCP system.

I'm not entirely sure what exactly you are trying to do. Do you want to be able to see the Mac from outside of the network? Please elaborate on your setup, maybe a diagram, and what you are trying to accomplish.

TEG

 

[atszyman]

The 169.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address is most likely self assigned by the G5 Mac because for some reason it thinks it's lost the connection to the DHCP server.

There could be a lot of reasons for this, bad cable, bad chip overheating, bad component in either the router or computer.

You could try setting the IP address to static in the System Preferences->Network options and the outages that cause the IP change might be infrequent enough and just repair themselves if the Mac doesn't try to reassign it's IP address.

The other thing you could do is to go into the advanced area of the System Preferences->Network and hit the Renew DHCP Lease to see if you get the IP address back that you expect. It would save you the reboot, but would still drop the Mac from the network when the IP address changes.