On Saturday 27 October 2007, Dan Farrell wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:58:11 +0930
>
> Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au> wrote:
> > is it by any chance assigning you a 169... address?  Did you recently
> > upgrade dhcpcd to ... around ... 3.1.6 I think?  Anyway, it now tries
> > "zeroconf" or whatever it's called, to give you an address when
> > there's no server around.  Personally I don't like it, but you can
> > decide :)
>
> This behaviour is called APIPA (Automatic PRivate IP Addressing)
> (from /etc/conf.d/net.example):
> # APIPA is a module that tries to find a free address in the range
> # Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA)
> # use APIPA to find a free address in the range
> # 	169.254.0.0-169.254.255.255
>
> It provides DHCP-like functionality without a DHCP server.  Pretty
> useless, unless you use it to configure all your IPs or a route for that
> subnet.

Even worse, if your DHCP server comes up later, your PC will still hold on to 
APIPA - not sure how this feature can be of any use to be honest, but most 
devices these days from MS Windows to PDAs tend to behave like this.
-- 
Regards,
Mick