Here's my 2 cents. And remember that advice is worth what you pay for it.
I assign all my fixed network devices a fixed internal IP address, but I start from the top of the range of addresses and work my way downward for servers and wired computers. That way they never get interferred with by DHCP which assigns from the bottom up. Everyone who visits these days has a laptop, ipad or some other wireless device, so I like to keep DHCP available for portable devices and war drivers.
DNS: This is perhaps one of the most nebulous concepts to grasp when you're trying to get a grip on networking and addressing. Any device that tries to resolve a www name to an ip address will look at the device defined that Might have the information. If that device can't resolve the name, it looks up the chain to the next device and so on until it finds a source that can translate
www.name.com to 263.58.472.65 or whatever. So when you're trying to decide what to put in for primary and secondary DNS servers, you actually have a few good options. If it's 3am and you just want to get it over with and get online, entering your router's base internal ip will work. You can also enter the ip of your gateway device. Any address your looking for that isn't buffered in your router is going to go up and out for resolution anyway. The better option: Look in your router to see if it lists the DNS servers that your router uses that are provided by your isp. This is where your gateway device sends any request it can't resolve. If you find those addresses, you can enter them into any NIC on your network that has been set up for fixed ip and defined DNS servers. Alternately, you can specify any DNS server you like that works.
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=e ... a97aebfa72
Free Public DNS Server
=> Service provider: Google
Google public dns server IP address:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
You can even use Googles! I think those ought to be pretty good.