network sanity check

[don't panic]

I'm building an intranet mostly for playing/testing my skills (and wasting time, mostly) - I've got 3 pcs and a laptop at home behind a router. My intention is to create a file server, a mysql or postgre database server, and a "workstation".

Is it best to simply assign static internal IP addresses? Right now, they are all dhcp leased addresses and although I usually know what's what ... in theory one can be 192.168.1.101 today and 192.168.1.102 tomorrow.
OR ...
Should I use names on my internal network which essentially are "resolved" to their current IP address? Does the router (assigning the addresses) keep track of that information?

Thanks in advance - I'm probably supposed to know this already but I wanted to be sure of my plan. Also if anyone cares to dissuade me from mysql with good reasons to choose postgre I'd listen up ... I've gotten a little uncomfortable with Oracle although I hope they will play nice with open source projects under their wings. But I have used mysql a little in the past, but postgre not at all.

[gapan]

In my opinion it's always better to use static IPs whenever possible.

[thenktor]

For home networks use static IP for your 3 servers. DHCP is useful if you want to manage the IPs of a lot of clients on a single server.

[Shador]

Static IPs are nice for servers imho. But as most other computers usually don't have a fixed config, I prefer to assign them "static" IP addresses over dhcp. I call them "static" because I configure the dhcp server to assign the same NIC/MAC always the same fixed ip address.

[don't panic]

Thanks for the replies. I'll start mucking about and post back when I've made a complete mess of things