1. IP address allocation mechanisms

In today's IP world , there are two techniques for assigning IP addresses to equipment: manual configuration and dynamic configuration.

Manual configuration of a piece of equipment consists in filling in a configuration file belonging to the equipment's operating system. This task is generally performed by the department responsible for network operation. Manual IP address allocation is certainly the simplest method of configuring a piece of equipment, but it quickly proves insufficient for medium- to large-scale networks. Indeed, it is relatively costly to have to connect locally to each piece of equipment in order to configure the IP stack. To automate this task, a protocol has been...