Conflicting IP address

Arlowbird

Apologies if this subject has been discussed before but your assistance would be greatly appreciated. I have Windows Vista using home WIFI together with a Samsung tablet. I have just bought a Motorola Moto G smartphone and since then have periodically been getting messages saying "The system detected an address conflict for IP address 192 **** with network hardware address F8****. Network operations on this system may be disrupted as a result. According to the information on the phone the F8**** address belongs to WIFI Mac Address.

I contacted Motorola who are saying that the problem is not with the phone and that the MAC Address is a unique number attributed to the phone's main board and can't be disconnected.

Help! Why is this happening? Is it anything to worry about? Has my computer been compromised?:(

yoyo

Moved from Comp & Tech.

Mr. G

That message is not really an indication to your PC being compromised. Not something to get worried about. Basically your router assigns each device an IP through DHCP unless you configure a static ip, and it got assigned one that is the same as an IP on another device.

Have you set up a static ip on any device on the network?

CreepingDeath

Mr. G wrote: »

That message is not really an indication to your PC being compromised.

+1

I had this problem when I got my girlfriend an iPad.

So when a device connects to your WiFi network, your router assigns it an address eg. 192.168.1.10.
Devices generally "lease" this address temporarily typically for 24 hours.

But some phones/tablets remember their previous address even when their lease has expired.

So after say 2 days, the router reassigns that 192.168.1.10 to another device, eg. your phone or PC.
Meanwhile, when you boot up your tablet it "thinks" it still is assigned to 192.168.1.10 and also tries using it.
That's when you get this message, 2 or more devices think they're entitled to use the same address, when only 1 is.

For me, I went into the router and manually assigned a static IP address to each and every device in my network.

So for example
- ipad = 192.168.1.10
- phone1 = 192.168.1.11
- phone2 = 192.168.1.12

Now there's no conflict because the router ALWAYS give the same IP address to the same device.

But if you suspect one particular device, ( and my money is on a tablet ), then you can just assign a static IP address to THAT device at a minimum.
I've gone into nerd overkill assigning static IP addresses to all devices.

Mr. G

Yep. You can assign a static ip from the router or set one on the device itself. The former is the easiest and best way in this situation, since some devices will put the static ip on all wireless networks and you will run into problems when trying to connect to another network.

Set it from your router and let us know how you get on

degsie

If you really want to get nerdy you could plug the F8**** number into http://www.coffer.com/mac_find/ to help track down the 'conflicting' device. This will give you the vendor name for the MAC address.

Arlowbird

Thank you everyone for your replies. For an old lady, I think I understand what has happened and am fairly happy that my computer hasn't been compromised. Now, for my next question (remember I am old !) how safe would it be to have a static IP address for my phone, tablet and computer? If you say it is as safe as it could be, how do I do it?

Thanks in advance for your valued advice

degsie

What make/model is your router?

Arlowbird

It's a Huawei E586Ds-2 Mi-fi from Three

ressem

Arlowbird wrote: »

Thank you everyone for your replies. For an old lady, I think I understand what has happened and am fairly happy that my computer hasn't been compromised. Now, for my next question (remember I am old !) how safe would it be to have a static IP address for my phone, tablet and computer? If you say it is as safe as it could be, how do I do it?

Thanks in advance for your valued advice

It would not make a difference to the device safety.

You would usually avoid setting a static address on a phone or tablet.
If you use them with a wifi network outside the home, every location's IP details are different and it would likely fail to connect to the internet. The device would have to be changed back again from Staticly allocated IP to Dynamically allocated IP each time ( a simple quick task but irritating).
If the tablet and laptop are not used outside the house then it's an option.

Rather than setting each device to static, it would be ideal to reserve an IP address specific to each MAC address using your router's DHCP server configuration page.

Unfortunately Huawei are too lazy and cheap to provide a management interface manual to help us describe the location for these setting or whether your device allows it.

One of the MAC prefixes for Samsung starts with F8:D0:BD: (the rest of the number is the bit specific to your device)
If this matches the number in the conflict error (and assuming that your laptop is not a samsung also) then the quick temporary fix is to power down the samsung tablet and power up again. It should then ask for a new address