[olug] ¿ iproute2 does not do any DHCP ?

Luke-Jr luke at dashjr.org
Tue Aug 31 22:41:58 UTC 2010


On Tuesday, August 31, 2010 05:11:35 pm Rob Townley wrote:
> Then i wanted to use ip to assign a dynamic ip or at least use it to
> set its configuration to be dynamic.  But it appears to me iproute2
> does not support setting the configuration of an IPv4 address to be
> dynamic let alone actually using it to obtain a dynamic ip address.  i
> am just looking for confirmation that i am reading the docs correctly
> and my attempts at using ip would correct.  Would somebody confirm
> this?  (Hoping Matthew Marsh delurks again)   Am i missing something?
> There is a "dynamic" parameter but that appears to be for IPv6 only.

IPv4 doesn't support dynamic addresses. There's another protocol called DHCP 
often used for that, which requires a DHCP client to broadcast a request and 
parse the reply. The DHCP client can then assign the server-delegated address 
to your interface, or pass the info to you for further decision-making. Linux 
itself *does* have a built-in DHCP client, but it's not usually used and 
almost always disabled at compile-time to save space.



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