On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 18:11, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:55, Scot L. Harris wrote:
If you disable zeroconf the 169.254 entry is dropped. What use is it? Nothing I have found explains what it is used for or why I need it on my systems. Waving your hands and saying don't be bothered by the existence of such entries does not explain what it is used for. Getting rid of it does not impact the systems either. Kind of like an appendix. :)
The idea is that you can plug machines into a local network and have them talk to each other with no setup and no preconfigured DHCP service. Each picks some more-or-less random and hopefully unique address in this subnet. Windows boxes will do it if a DHCP request times out. Machines can find and access each other by name with broadcast based naming like netbios or dns over multicast like rendezvous.
I understand what it is suppose to do. But as far as I can tell it has never been used. Has anyone actually used zeroconf for this? Other than to test it to see if it actually works?