I have a home modem/router/gateway. To make it less findable with hard-coded bad-actor scripts running inside my network, I wanted to put the modem/gateway IP address in the middle of the DHCP pool of addresses instead of ".1" (10.0.0.50, with a DHCP pool of 10.0.0.40-10.0.0.200).
The modem won't let me. I get one of two errors. If I put the modem at the edge of the DHCP pool, I get "The Beginning IP Address cannot be the same as the modem IP address." If I put the gateway somewhere else in the DHCP pool, I get, "The modem IP address cannot be between the beginning IP address and the ending IP address."
Now I know why everybody is pushed to put their modem at x.x.x.1. If it goes anywhere else, otherwise usable subnet IP addresses are sacrificed from the DHCP pool. Arghh...
I can't think of a technical reason my gateway shouldn't be able to live in the middle of the DHCP range. Is this just a limit of my device, or is there some technical reason regardless of network hardware vendors? What am I missing?