samba and dhcp problem

[beef at cybertouch.org]

	Hello,

	Can someone please help me out with the following. I have 
installed Samba for FreeBSD. It runs and at *times* runs great. But 
here is the big problem. Well the problem involves the ISP I am 
connected to, I think. 

	I am connected to the Internet via cablemodem. The cable co. 
uses a dhcp server. From time to time the IP's change. Today I 
was lucky as all my IP's were in the 24.64.136 range. With all 3 
IP's from the cablemodem using those set of numbers, and using 
Samba to say listen to MP3's (as a test) I noticed immediately that 
the sound was no longer broken up. I looked at the hub and further 
noticed that the pc's were talking to each other without going out to 
the net as had been the way it was prior. 

	After installing corel8, and rebooting one of the windows 
machines, I had the misfortune of having one windows machine 
coming up with 24.64.138.88 and I was back to broken sounds, not 
being able to re-connect to shared drives (via samba on FreeBSD 
box..which IP had not changed). I then edited smb.conf in the allow 
hosts section to have it as:
hosts allow = 24.64.136. 24.64.138. 127.
but this did not help. So, I entered in networking, in Win98 control 
panel, in the section "specify IP address" my old IP and rebooted. 
When the system came back up, I had my old number. I enabled 
(prior) wins server in SMB.CONF and in WINS, in network, I put the 
address of the FreeBSD box. Now after rebooting with the above, 
forcing my old ip to be used, I am again able to listen to those 
MP3's unbroken.

	Is there some sort or work around to all this. There will come a 
time shortly when I will not be able to get my old IP #. I thought by 
adding in hosts allow that the other set of IP #'s (24.64.136 and 
24.64.138) would be sufficient. But it seems not to be. I guess 
what I am saying is that for many things to run well, they must go 
via the ethernet and not out to the internet. Which just slows things 
down to a snails pace.

Thank you in advance for any help which you may be able to offer.

Lanny Baron