> > How does ITS give you an address? Using DHCP, my address is
> > net51-82.student.yale.edu. Is this the address that I have to use or can I
> > change it to something more appealing?
>
> DHCP works by indexing ethernet hardware addresses against their
> respective IP configurations.
Just to be utterly pedantic, in case anyone cares, this isn't strictly
true. _BootP_ works by assigning configuration info based on hardware
addresses (Ethernet or otherwise); DHCP *can* do this, and that's a large
part of how we use it here, but it can also use other criteria to
determine an address.
For instance, our DHCP server will never give you an IP address that
doesn't work on the physical network segment your machine is currently
connected to. If you move your machine to Old Campus, for instance,
you'll get a different IP address even though your hardware address has
(of course) stayed the same.
[ Sorry! I'll shut up soon. :) But in the meantime... ]
DHCP is often used in even less structured ways. Coming from Yale's
fairly regimented DHCP structure, it might be a surprise for some of us to
see a company network where IP addresses are basically assigned
haphazardly (the only invariant being that no address is ever given out
twice at the same time), but I *think* that's still fairly common.
> A computer that's using DHCP sends out a request to the network to get
> configured, which is received by the DHCP server, which then sends
> appropriate return messages to configure the DHCP client.
If anyone's *really* interested, take a look at Doug Comer's
"Internetworking with TCP/IP, Volume 1" for a neat state diagram
describing in explicit detail the stages of DHCP configuration.
> The other thing is that if you have a vanity domain name (the
> existence of which has already been touched upon), it'll set your
> hostname to the netxx-xx thing even though that's no longer your
> hostname.
Yeah -- vanity hostnames aren't propagated to the DHCP server (they exist
only in DNS), so it always sends out netxx-yy to students.
Shawn