My BT SmartHub-2 is set to do this & unless I’m mistaken it comes set (default) to this on delivery.
The IP Address can be changed & I’ve done that, but I always reset back to ‘Always Use This IP Address’.
Unlike some previous hubs I’ve had, the SH2 never changes the IP Address allocated or any users preference reset IP…
‘Always Use This IP Address’ is a great option to set for static stuff like streamers and NAS drives, but not necessarily as important for things like phones. I’d be surprised if all devices have this set by default, but I dont have a BT router. For others, typically the option is found around DHCP settings on routers, as it is the DHCP component that assigned IP Addresses (and subnets, DNS and router addresses) to devices that connect to the router.
Indeed the dhcp RFI, I seem to remember recommends the currently assigned IP address be reassigned if available, so it should not change if the lease is immediately renewed… and nothing else is trying to grab it.
The most reliable way i find is to use host names/DNS and let your SH2 deal with that… and then refer to this name in mounts etc. Unless your client software is extremely basic or old, this should be its preferred way of working, and indeed these days how many professional networks work… applications shouldn’t be referring to fixed ip addresses unless very are very specific reasons to.
For example my NAS is referenced by ‘\\nas-35-37-xx\Music’ by all devices on my home network, no IP address is used. The actual IP address can change, though it doesn’t and clients can use ipv4 or ipv6 by choice. Far more flexible and reliable.
Even my NDX2 status page is accessed by putting the following into a browser… this is achieved by using mDNS that Naim supports… and is a DNS technique that does not need your router to manage DNS.
NDX2-4460xx.local
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I’m giving DNS a miss Simon, this SH2 works faultlessly for me without it.
Unlike my experiences with previous BT hubs & some other highly recommended 3rd party boxes, this one is a real benchmark.
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Sure Mike… it’s totally upto users… the SH2 should work faultlessly either way… it doesn’t care… it’s more about user flexibility …
You do see relatively many posts with people struggling or querying IP addresses, and in this day and age the IP address should be transparent and irrelevant… we are not in the 1990s. …and with ipv6 increasingly used by products and services where they can for improved performance, probably just as well 
But yes the BT SH2 I think is a cracking piece of kit… I agree many 3rd party products could take a lead from its design.
I have always used same IP addresses . Confess never looked at editing hosts file.
Will have a look at this.
As mentioned before when opening File explorer you can see the allocated device name under media devices without problem, also as mentioned before guessing this is Upnp managed. It’s only finding the device name under the Network devices tabs that is an issue. What I have not tried so far is deleting the device name I’m the router and see what happens then.
Didn’t see it in the above posts but have you assigned static/reserved IP addresses to the HDX? What about a mapped network drive? Could your cable modem be issuing DHCP addresses by chance (if you have one, is it in bridged mode?) - double NAT?
Hi I wasn’t thing of editing host files which would work for some clients, but be rather cumbersome… kind of deprecated now other than for certain specific use cases … rather than using the local dns function on your router where the host name is usually linked to the assigned dhcp address. On the BT SH2 it defaults to your local domain being .home so you would refer to a device as [device host name].home … or without using dns in your router there is mDNS which most modern consumer devices support which uses broadcast multicast … it’s the clients them selves that listen and respond to the mDNS query, the local domain is .local for mDNS… so it is [device host name].local
With these methods you do nothing…it’s plug and play if supported … and no faffing around with numeric ip addresses… which are best not referred to unless you have no choice.
On my home network nothing is accessed by needing to refer to specific numeric ip addresses.
My original suggestion of hosts file was as described at the time a workaround, as for whatever reason, the normal methods that should work, is not working for the OP. I suspect though that we are all itching to actually be on site to give hands on help, but here we are limited to text responses only.
This may not be applicable here, but Windows 10 doesn’t fully shutdown when the you ask it to - it defaults to standby. Most users dont know this, and when you ask them to reboot, they would say they shutdown every day, but when you look on the device, it has an up-time of several months. So to the OP, can you confirm you have actually done a Restart rather than shutdown and startup? You can also get the last reboot time from the command “net statistics workstation” which shows a date near the top of the output. Apologies if you already know this.
Also if you do end up editing the hosts file (and again sorry if you already know this) but bear in mind that it is a text file, and its name is hosts, and not hosts.txt.
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