Subject: Protocol Action: DHCP Option to Disable Stateless

From: [email-masked] (by way of Ralph Droms)
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 06:14:02 -0500 (EST)

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'DHCP Option to Disable
Stateless Auto-Configuration in IPv4 Clients'
<draft-ietf-dhc-autoconfig-04.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  This
document is the product of the Dynamic Host Configuration Working
Group.  The IESG contact persons are Jeffrey Burgan and Thomas Narten.

Technical Summary

Operating Systems are now attempting to support ad-hoc networks of two
or more systems, while keeping user configuration at a minimum.  To
accommodate this, in the absence of a central configuration mechanism
(DHCP), some OS's are automatically generating a link-local IP address
which will allow them to communicate with other hosts on the same
link.  This address will not allow the OS to communicate with anything
beyond a router.  However, some sites depend on the fact that a host
with no DHCP response will have no IP address.  This document
describes a mechanism by which DHCP servers are able to tell clients
that they do not have an IP address to offer, and that the client
should not generate an IP address it's own.

Working Group Summary

There was strong consensus within WG for moving this document forward.

Protocol Quality

This document has been reviewed for the IESG by Thomas Narten.