[Techtalk] serverless IP assignment?

Akkana akkana at shallowsky.com
Tue Feb 12 16:12:39 EST 2002


Michelle Murrain writes:
> At 12:21 PM 2/12/2002, Malcolm wrote:
> >If we've got to do that for the DCHP server, what advantage is there for
> >using the DCHP server over the same technique for picking a random IP?

I've been reading with interest because I once wrote software to do
basically this, in a previous job.  This was before DHCP (they were
working on the spec and we were tracking it, but weren't sure when
it was going to be frozen) so I invented my own simple protocol (much
simpler than DHCP) to do this.  But then the DHCP spec started to firm
up and we decided to go with that, so we never polished up the other
software (and I no longer have a copy of it).  All I can say (which
is no direct help, sorry!) is that ten years ago there was no apparent
way to do this without writing at least a little bit of networking
software (which doesn't say anything about whether a solution exists
now, ten years later).  Designing a simple protocol and implementing
it was fairly easy and fun.  Now, the programming would be simpler
because you could write something that broadcasts for a DHCP server,
and if it doesn't find one, starts a server itself; you could probably
program that in a scripting language like perl if you didn't want to
get down and dirty writing C networking code.

	...Akkana



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