IP conflict on router-- two computers fighting over the same IP

[djr33]

Recently, the wifi connection on my computer has from time to time become very slow when I'm at home. Sometimes when this happens I receive a warning "your IP address [....] is being used by another device."

I'm using a macbook, with a linksys router, and several other devices are connected to the internet here from time to time-- an iPhone, an HTC phone, and a Windows laptop.

I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this because I can't find an option to pick another IP, but it seems stupid that something wouldn't shift if two devices are fighting over an IP... it's not like the IP matters, as long as it's unique.

Any ideas?

[Beverleyh]

Maybe this will help?: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=9983422&postcount=13

[djr33]

Thanks for the link. OSX is a little different with the newer versions, but at least now I have an idea about where to look and what settings to try.
One thing I don't really understand is how I could control which IPs are reserved... is this only for an Apple Airport router, or is it something that other routers will also respect?

[Beverleyh]

When I had a snoop around similar mac help forums there were other routers mentioned so I think it might work for others too, give or take some phraseology/setting names. I'm not big on hardware configuration but the guys in the office assign static IPs for all of our stuff so that's the line of thought that looks most workable to me.

There's also this thread on the Apple forum that is from the middle of last year so hopefully the fix is still relevant - 4 down by SocialGen: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2500433?start=105&tstart=0
Looks similar to the other fix but there's some turning things off and on again involved too.

[djr33]

Thanks. I'll play with this then. It's hard to know if it's fixed or not because it doesn't happen too often (about once a day), but I'll know in a while if it's working better. If not, I'll continue to change things and see if that helps.