By default, the network interface card setting for a windows computer is configured to receive a dynamic IP address from a DHCP server. However, it is sometimes necessary to assign a static IP address to your Home Network Computer or to a server on your Local Area Network. Assigning a static IP to your Home Computer is a good security practice since you can configure your Home Internet Router to allow access to the Internet to only that specific IP address. Also, for LAN servers is a must to have static IP addresses assigned to them since these servers might need to be accessed from the Internet (therefore you will need a static NAT translation), and also you will need a static DNS binding of the server domain name with its static IP address.

In this post I will show an example configuration to setup a static IP address for a Windows XP computer. Similar settings are used for almost all Windows versions. Lets start: [Read more…]