Denys BeauchEmin writes:

>I know, from painful experience
>that Macs do not use DHCP.  You have to keep track of their IP addresses
>all the time, which is a pain if you have several on a network.

Denys is completely wrong, but this is not unusual when he disseminates
Macintosh technical information. Any Mac that can use OpenTransport,
which is every one made in the last five years, and not a few from before
that, can use DHCP. It would be nice if Denys would confine his Macintosh
remarks to pontifications about the Macintosh's future, where his
opinions can be given the weight they deserve.

It so happens that Denys called me for assistance about a year ago,
during precisely the "painful experience" he describes. The 1990-vintage
Macintosh he was connecting was equipped with MacTCP 2.0.4, which was
released in 1992. It was too much trouble for him to update to later
software since he had to connect only one machine. 1992-vintage Macintosh
software supported BOOTP for IP address management rather than DHCP. This
astonishing technical lapse can probably be attributed to the fact that
DHCP had not yet been invented.

It's true that early versions of OpenTransport couldn't get certain
information from NT servers, though they worked properly with many other
DHCP implementations -- including HP-UX. That's because Microsoft's early
WinNT DHCP server implementation had bugs (shocking though this may
seem). The bugs were fixed in NT 4.0, and Apple added a workaround in
late 1996.

-- Bruce




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