Afternoon all, Apologies for the lack of posts – it was recently my 21st birthday and i have been away from my computer. I was recently asked what is APIPA in a technical interview and i unfortunately had no idea – thinking along the lines of Application Programming Interface… etc. After a brief google, i discovered, much to my disdain, that infact it is something ive known for a while yet not revised the term for!
APIPA, described here http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/protocolsdhcp/g/bldef_apipa.htm, is “Automatic Private IP Addressing”. This is the mechanism that is used by Windows DHCP when it times out on DHCP Request. After 30 seconds / specified timeout, if no IP has been recieved, then instead of leaving the IP field blank, using APIPA, Windows allocates the NIC a Class B address in the range of 169.254.0.1 to 254 to enable further connectivity. Read more on the link.
