Normally not. By default, routers hand out IP addresses by using the DHCP service. Essentially, when starting a device it sends a broadcast on the LAN, saying âhey Iâm here, can I have an IP address?â and the router assigns one.
This is the safest way because every IP address must only exist once on the network, else there are collisions, i.e., some other device sends a packet to an IP address on the network and two other devices answer instead of one. Then each of these devices with colliding addresses will receive only a part of the packets and things go very wrong.
When using DHCP, the router is responsible for assigning unique addresses and this works essentially always.
When configuring fixed addresses directly on the devices, the user is responsible for giving each device a unique address and itâs easy to make errors, forget to update addresses if something changes, etc. Itâs also useless work.
When one device has a fixed address while DHCP is enabled on the router, the router does not know about this and might assign the same address to another device, hence creating a collision. (In this case, most routers allow to reserve this address to avoid assigning it, but thatâs often forgotten by the user).
Such collisions typically lead to intermittent errors that are difficult to track down. The routerâs DHCP typically assigns IP address from a range, and most of the time things might work because the router doesnât happen to choose an address that is already occupied by one device as a fixed IP. And once in a while it randomly chooses the occupied one and things break.
In short, everybody should be using DHCP on the router and not fixed addresses that are assigned on individual devices, unless
- one is a network admin whose job is to manage complex networks and knows exactly why they need a fixed address on a device.
- one knows for sure that a device has a broken DHCP service and needs a fixed address. This is very rare and in this case the address MUST be reserved on the router (i.e., excluded from the assignable addresses)
This intermittent failure mode sounds a lot like what you are experiencing. Hence my recommendation to check if the Devialet might have a fixed address configured (or possibly some other devices on your network). In the thread I linked further up, having a fixed address on the Devialet led exactly to the error message that you also experienced, âDevice in useâ.
If the Devialet has a fixed address configured, change it to using DHCP. (And all other devices if you did this anywhere. Alternatively be SURE that fixed addresses you assigned to devices on the network are ALL correct and reserved on the router).
If the Devialet is already configured to use DHCP, we have at least ruled out one possibility.
