• Network Infrastructure

    APIPA, Not Just An Acronym Palindrome

    The acrodrome (yes, I just made that up, although I wasn’t sure if palinym was a better choice – decided on acrodome because I wasn’t as afraid of Tea Party snipers coming to murder me as I would have been if I used palinym) APIPA stands for Automatic Private IP Addressing. APIPA is in every version of Windows since NT and all versions of Mac OS X. APIPA is a dhpc mechanism that provides dhcp clients with self-assigned IP addresses when DHCP servers are not available. When there isn’t a DHCP server available, APIPA assigns IPs from 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254 with a default mask of 255.255.0.0. Clients leverage arp to…