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Blosxom

       

home :: admin :: automaticIP

Mon, 29 Apr 2013

I despise 'Automatic Private IP Addressing'

The number of times where a Mac, an iPad, or a Windows machine has caused me grief by chosing to self-assign an "Automatic Private IP Address" is becoming annoyingly large.

I would much rather have these machines inform me that there is a problem with the DHCP server on the local LAN and that I should fix it, rather than trying to self assign an IP address in the range of 169.254.x.y, which generally doesn't work and doesn't let the machine talk with any of the other devices on the network... and of course, because the machine that tried to helpfully self assign an address thusly will not notify me of this, meaning that it will take longer to find out what has gone wrong.

Sometimes, especially on Apple devices, it will also be annoyingly hard to make the device snap out of this mode and actually request a brand new IP address from the local DHCP server. Argh! In addition to that, it is usually distressingly hard to disable this behavior in devices, as they all try to be simple and auto-configurable. Argh again!

Another woe of DHCP address assignment are home routers that do not provide options to manage the list of assigned DHCP addresses or their corresponding leases, and which therefore run out of assignable addresses with leases running well into 2021 or something! Recently, my Livebox from Orange ran out of available DHCP addresses, and therefore stopped giving them out... which caused various networking equipment to fail in interesting ways.

So yes, I know: "use static IP addresses". I do that most of the time, but still have my various mobile devices configured for DHCP, simply because that's what ones does when travelling with ones' mobile devices.

Anyway, here's hoping for:

  1. a simple way to disable 169.254 addresses in Windows, IOS, and Mac OS X
  2. a simple way to edit the DHCP leases table on the old Sagem Livebox

So yeah, I'm not holding my breath :-)

/admin | Posted at 18:52 | permanent link