Internet Protocol: changing IP freely

Personally, I find the amount of problems you can easily foresee when coming up with a plan inversely correlates with how simply the plan is executed. In short, the jobs that look the simplest on paper turn out to be the ones that give the most headaches.

For instance, installing Hamachi on a string of virtual machines (VMs) was probably a good idea at the time for whoever did it, but when the developers tried to use the same VMs for testing our database sync utility, it took me a while to figure out that Amicus was using the Hamachi connecter settings when populating local and remote sync server records. This is fine if you want to test synchronising to external sites, but when we are just trying to test using our local network, it isn’t ideal.

Another IP-related headache I had recently was the use of an Ethernet thermal printer we had installed at a client’s site. Suddenly, it stopped working (most likely due to the recent use of a USB modem that had been plugged in) and the computer had been assigned a random IP address. Since the range had been changed from that of the Ethernet thermal printer, it stopped working. This wasn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. At another site, in an effort to fix an internet problem, a technician had come in and reconfigured the site’s router and with it the IP address, as well as the IP addresses of all DHCP-configured machines on the network. Of course, the printer has a static IP and stopped working.

If only we could print directly to MAC addresses, perhaps…