On Thursday 19 August 2004 07:30 am, Jerry Feldman wrote:
I noticed last night while trying to configure my SuSE 9.1 laptop for MIT, that the routing table had en entry for 169.254.0.0. It is coming from the network scripts, ifup-route. It shouldn't hurt, but I was wondering why this was done, or is it something that someone at SuSE set up. I haven't seen any documentation on this either.
Jerry, if you do a whois 169.254.0.0 you will see it eventually goes to some server called BLACKHOLE. As I understand it, that's what it is. When xp fails to get the proper IP from the DHCP server, it gets one of the 169.254 numbers and nothing works. The strange thing is, as soon as Linux fires up on the same machine I get the correct local IP. I'm sure there is some longwinded answer somewhere but the short one is it's a dummy IP. Now some guru can step in and tell us the REAL STORY! Richard