I'm having serious issues with the GS502 playing nice with my router.

My router is a Linksys BEFSR81.

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satel...=1115416832205

A few days ago I noticed my router was cycling over and over. It did this after there was an IP assignment conflict on my network (running DHCP).

The fix was supposedly to assign a static IP address to the 502, which I did in the ATA. And after rebooting a few times, all was well with my phone and my network.

However, when the IP address expired on the VOIPo servers, the ATA went down and stayed down.

I cannot find the settings in my router to set an IP address for the 502 using the MAC address. Anyone know what that would be called on a Linksys router?

Now, I am going to try setting up my network with all static IP addresses and turn off DHCP to see if that works (and hopefully not affect the rest of my network).

If not, I may set them all static except for the 502 and leave DHCP on to just renew the 502. Though I suspect that may not work.

If that doesn't work, I will have to try putting the 502 in front of my router again (which didn't work last time) and see if I can get that to work.

This is all kind of frustrating to me because I am not that knowledgeable in network management and I tend to make mistakes I don't realize and really screw things up.

Setting static IPs for all the devices on my network including the 502, should make this problem go away right?

What is the benefit of DHCP on a home network?

Should I update the router's firmware?

Thanks in advance for your help.