Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

Prompted by a recent discussion on the T60/T61 eCS list and via PM, I am wondering if anyone has any real experience using bogus addresses...er...Zeroconf...er...Automatic Private IP Addresses (in Micro$oft-speak)?

A couple Wikipedia links of interest, and the real meat and potatoes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-local_address
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Private_IP_Addressing
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927

Personally, I stay away from these things, but I do know some Mac users who participate in wireless peer networks and who do use them successfully. Naturally, the IPv6 implementation doesn't have much use for us at this point in time (as OS/2 does not ahve an IPv6-aware IP stack!), but XWLAN does have the ability to use them and eCS 2.0 RC4 seems to have an interesting entry in SETUP.CMD called "llaecs" (see http://ewiki.ecomstation.nl/ecomstation20rc4whatsnew ).

TIA

I believe another name for this is APIPA.

This kicks in when there is no DHCP server available on a network and you have not configured a static IP address. It defaults to using a class B (i.e. 255.255.0.0) range starting with  169.254.0.1 and going up to 169.254.255.254 it is a random selection.

As far as I know this is mainly of use on private networks as without static data or DHCP systems don't know where to find the gateway to get out to other networks such as the internet.

I'm not sure if OS/2 has support for this or not - it may have as it is an approved standard - not just an M$ thing.