Manually setting it is fine for geeks with WEP or WPA, but setting it up on enterprise networks is a major PITA
Myself I don't use them Wireless modes, give me a nice wired connection any ol day.. I am behind a hardware firewall and a proxy (Squid.) I just like to use static IP's and have control over my network.
Plus how many times does one change IP's in an intranet? Even on medium sized networks running 1000 machines. Actually setting up IP blocks for certain divisions would be a good thing. Plus auditing a particular machine would be a breeze. If it is explicitly set to one IP.
For my use in the home. It makes it much easier to route traffic and set up tables. For each machine IP. My machine using Linux. Does not need filtering like my wife's Windows box needs. Nor the server.. If I only change out the IP like.. Never. Why fire off a module that would waste CPU time. Slow up the boot and use RAM. Set it to be static and not one issue.
One last input... Even if I did use wireless. Which I sometimes do use.. My spare XP box has a wireless card in it, and I sometimes use that. Which I am not against actually. Would it not be safer if you set specific IP's and enhance security by disallowing random/automatic DHCP addressing from the access point?
I know a The Cleveland Water network is all static IP's. My brother in law has to set the IP he is assigned. When he is at specific plants. So he can connect the laptop he is issued, for that specific plant location. If my brother is close. There is something like 25,000 machines on that network.. Which seems to be a guess, but not far off probably. The agency is rather large and serves a huge area. I could call the IT there. I talked to one SysOp once. Asking about a script review for my brother in law to use on his issued laptop( runs XP like most of the city machines.) So it was easier for him to change out IP's as he went plant to plant and do his jorb.
Actually not only was it ok'ed/ I was asked if they could use it for the personnel who migrate around the network.
The super cool thing about Linux. We can discuss what manager and ways to do it, that is best or handy. It's one of the perks us Linux users have. We are not limited like MS users in this sense.
