Re: lynx-dev "Looking up ... "

[David Woolley]

>  
> i thought IPs were the basic `GPS co-ordinates' of cyberspace:
> when, how & why are they dynamically allocated?

Most IP addresses on the internet are dynamically allocated these days
(with important exceptions).  The reasons are that there is a shortage
of them, and when you can't predict which port on which terminal server
a user will dial into, it is easier to allocate the addresses to the
ports than the users (although Demon have implemented the dynamic 
re-routing to get round this).

However, legitimate servers will normally have a fixed IP addresss.

Intranets are a different matter as Microsoft, at least, sell the idea of
administrator-less networks, so they have extensions to the nameing protocols
to allow a machine connecting to the network to grab a free address and propose
a name for itself for inclusion into the company nameserver.  I think they
would like to extend these concepts to the internet, although, by frustrating
caching, they would not scale well (but www.microsoft.com is not noted for
its cacheability, anyway!)