As with many home LANs, my router assigns IP addresses (via DHCP) from the range 192.168 ...
Just yesterday, my PC lost its connection the internet. When the standard troubleshooting didn't help, I took a closer look and discovered that my PC (actually, the Ethernet NIC in my PC) had obtained the address 169.254.170.79, which is clearly outside the range of addresses available from my router.
With further research I learned that a network device can occasionally assign itself an IP address in the 169.254 ... range when, for whatever reason, it is unable to contact a DHCP server. This is known as a link-local IPv4 address.
The purpose of link-local addresses is to make it possible for a device to continue communicating with other network devices even without an address assigned by DHCP (or assigned manually.) The last two octets (170.79 in my case) are randomly generated to prevent address conflicts.
That's all very interesting, but how can I return to obtaining an IP address from my router?
Just yesterday, my PC lost its connection the internet. When the standard troubleshooting didn't help, I took a closer look and discovered that my PC (actually, the Ethernet NIC in my PC) had obtained the address 169.254.170.79, which is clearly outside the range of addresses available from my router.
With further research I learned that a network device can occasionally assign itself an IP address in the 169.254 ... range when, for whatever reason, it is unable to contact a DHCP server. This is known as a link-local IPv4 address.
The purpose of link-local addresses is to make it possible for a device to continue communicating with other network devices even without an address assigned by DHCP (or assigned manually.) The last two octets (170.79 in my case) are randomly generated to prevent address conflicts.
That's all very interesting, but how can I return to obtaining an IP address from my router?