Why DHCP Lease Expiration Matters for Your Coffee Shop Router | Hacker News Reader

Why DHCP Lease Expiration Matters for Your Coffee Shop Router

nerderati.com

4 pointsHayvok9 comments

It still kills me to see everyone using 192.168.1.0/24. IMHO, there is only one reason not to use 10.0.0.0/8 and it's because that can sometimes conflict with the address space commonly used for work VPNs. If that's an issue, an arbitrary /16 from the 172.16 - 172.32 range would be a good bet. I haven't really been using cheap consumer routers with their stock OS in a while (maybe 10 years), but is it still common for them to be stuck on 192.168.x.0/24 for the LAN side? I kinda assumed this was more of a problem from like 10 years ago, but I could be wrong I guess.

The only router I've had at home that used Class 10.0.0.0/8 by default was a AirPort Time Capsule. The other three or four I've had over the years were configured to Class 192.168.0.0/16 by default

Yep and the 10.0.0.0 on an Airport killed my wife's VPN as it couldn't route as expected and then I wasted half a day trying to figure out what might be wrong on a completely locked down desktop after 1st line support gave up and said it should work must be a problem with your wifi.

In my very anecdotal experience, the block that most consumer routers ship with as a configured default is, by far, 192.168.1.0/24 or 192.168.0.0/24. I've run across a handful of 172.*, but they were so exceptional that they stood out.

I imagine that vendors (e.g Linksys) are not inclined to change them, perhaps because they simply work for most people, and changing the default would most likely invalidate the rather large number of tutorials, FAQs, guides, etc. that simply assume that IPs are assigned from the 192.168.0.1-254 range.

What is the reasoning for not using the 192.168.0.x address space? I'm a networking newbie who doesn't understand. I've actually changed a few routers to use the 192.168.0.x instead of the 10.x.x.x space that was the default. Why should I not have done that?

No reason. All work equally well

Thanks. That's what I figured, but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

TLDR - very long technical explanation of DHCP with recommendation to reduce the lease time.

Correct!

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