setting IP address manually

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:50 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 00:07 -0500, Jeff Vian wrote:
> > You do not have to actively tell it to do so, it is part of the
> > configuration protocol and that behavior is seen on all OSes I have
> > ever worked with (except maybe the antique DOS). For sure all modern
> > TCP stacks make that check.
> 
> I've seen it happen, and I can postulate several reasons why it might
> have worked:
> 
> The other machine wasn't on the network when you set your IP.
> A firewall on the other machine might have broken this feature.
> You've brought a pre-configured machine to a network.

All of those conditions could allow a second machine to get set up with
the same IP.  However, as soon as both machines were active on the
network communications to/from them would break because the arp
responses would confuse all others trying to communicate (switches,
routers, bridges, and hosts alike).  

To see the conflict they would also have to be in the same physical
network segment since they would have the same IP, and netmask and a
physical segment change would eliminate the conflict (except for
bridging).


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>