DHCP Tutorial

Every device on a network needs an IP address before it can communicate. There are two ways to give it one: configure the address by hand on each device, or let the device request one automatically from a server. The second approach uses the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP, and it is by far the more common choice in real networks.

The main benefit of DHCP is that a device can join a network without having any prior knowledge of it. It does not need to know the subnet, the mask, the gateway, or the DNS servers in advance — it simply asks, and a DHCP server supplies all of that information.