Isn't this what the UPMP (???) protocol was for? I seem to remember something about it being able to automagically detect what the network settings should be...
It's UPnP (Universal Plug 'n' Play), and it's supposed to be there for something that hasn't got an IP address and doesn't necessarily have a DHCP server on the network, AFAICT.
http://www.upnp.org/download/draft-ietf-zeroconf-ipv4-linklocal-01-Apr.txt has some info about autoconfiguration and the 169.254/16 IP range, which some people may recognise as the address you see when your DHCP fails. Haven't read enough of it to tell whether it'll do what Martin wants, but I suspect it won't quite cut it.
From reading Martin's original requirements, it looks like it's mostly doable, with the exception of times when 2 machines are configured with the same IP address. In theory one could just ignore the IP address and consider the MAC address, as it's the real one you care about when talking over ethernet anyway, and will be unique - as long as you maintained a list of both the MAC and IP addresses of the clients, you could NAT everything properly (and assuming the NICs of the offending machines weren't operating in promiscuous mode).
Would probably require some kernel hacking, and having 2 machines with the same IP could confuse other services running on the subnet that didn't know about your routing. Might also confuse switches, I guess, although I would expect a switch to be operating with Ethernet MAC addresses rather than IP addresses.
Chris.
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
