Yep. Unless/until it is powered-off long enough and Misha has 115 or
so other devices request IP addresses of the DHCP server on his home
gateway
What's interesting is that it kept the same IP address from one
house to another, under different networks (both using 191.168.1.1
as the gateway).
More or less luck that both you and your friend's home gateways
defaulted to useing 192.168.1.0/16 as the default private IP address
space for the home network. 192.168.1.0/16 is a fairly common
convention among such devices, though one probably shouldn't come to
depend on that.
Likely as not, the printer "remembered" it had 192.168.1.116, and when
it sent the DHCP request it, in essence, asked "May I still use this
IP address?" and the DHCP server function said "Yes."
While the odds of something else attaching to your network and getting
192.168.1.116 as its IP address are probably pretty low, it might be a
Good Idea (tm) to go into the configuration of your home gateway, and
see where its dynamically assigned IP range ends and the static range
begins. At some point you may need/want to configure the printer with
a static IP, though that will require reconfiguring the machines
you've already configured to print to it. If that day comes, altering
the dynamic range so that 192.168.1.116 isn't in it, and statically
configuring the printer to use 192.168.1.116 might be the way to go.
rick jones
despite my email address, I actually know very little about HP
printers themselves...