On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 17:53, Scot L. Harris wrote:
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?
My networks all have either carefully designed IP addressing schemes or a NAT router with DHCP. Since home NAT routers are so cheap, I'd guess that everyone who has a small network has one, but I don't have any reason to doubt that this address would work with samba and windows clients on an isolated network with no DHCP.