Not Quite Crappy, But Still Confusing

I just bought an Apple Time Capsule this week (and, boy, did Apple ship it fast! Received it three days after I ordered it!). I bought it mostly for its ability to automate back-ups to its own hard drive, but also thought it was cool that it is a router containing the next gen of wifi ("N").

I ran into a confusing bit as I tried to set up its DHCP, however, and thought I'd include the solution here in case there are others in a similar situation. My problem is that my two printers, which happily hung on my previous network (a combination of wifi and wired connection), were nowhere to be found on the new, Time Capsule-based network.

The solution lay in the DHCP range, or, as it puts it in Airport Utility:

DHCP Beginning Address
DHCP Ending Address

For some reason I haven't been able to figure out, Apple has the beginning address default to 10.0.1.2 and the ending address defaults to 10.0.1.200. What this means is that all IP addresses on this internal network fall in that range: 10.0.1.2 to 10.0.1.200.

My printers, however, are at static IP addresses of 192.168.0.201 and 192.168.0.202. Hence, they fall outside the range. But the thing is, I've installed probably three or four routers at my house and the range of each of those routers was always 192.168.*.*. So why the heck has Apple chosen such a low range? Any answers? I'd truly like to know, but Googling the issue hasn't revealed the answer.

Once I tumbled to that off-beat DHCP range, I was able to use Airport Utility to change the beginning/ending addresses to 192.168.0.2/192.168.0.200. Now, the printers work just fine because they're on the same subnet as the DHCP addresses. And, since they're above *.*.*.200, there are no DHCP conflicts.

I wish Apple had been clearer about this!