thats what i ment, though i think i didnt express my thoughts well. i do the same thing at home, the dhcp server will give out address in the 192.168.1.100/150 range, the desktop machines use dhcp and my web and mail server are assigned static addresses, the way i did it was just to go from 192.168.1.2 and on.

i was wrong about not being able to assign addresses within that range, ( the amount of IPs the dhcp server is set to give out.)
and as neo said , assign them outside of the normal range.

to make it simple, you can assign a static ip to a client, as long as that ip is not in use by another dhcp client.

sorry, the mistake was confusion on my part.