APIPA

APIPA

Automatic Private IP Addressing. A feature of systems running under Windows, which provides a means of assigning an IP address to a network card should no DHCP server be available to provide one.

Under APIPA, when Windows fails to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server it allocates an address from the range 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254. It then uses ARP to ensure that the allocated address is unique.

For more information see:

• www.duxcw.com/faq/network/autoip.htm - Article on APIPA
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q220874/ - Microsoft Knowledge Base article on How to use automatic TCP/IP addressing without a DHCP server. Includes how to turn this feature off if desired.