John D. Baker wrote:
[ ... ]
> The secondary boot program first tries BOOTP/DHCP to get its boot
> information.  I can confirm that BOTH of my MacOS X boxes attempted to
> satisfy its desires.  Not only the machine I'd intended to use before,
> but also the original iMac that's been standing in as NAT router until
> I could get the real machine put together.  (For some weird reason,
> "Internet connection sharing" starts bootpd with the undocumented "-P"
> switch.  It must mean "promiscuous" or "permissive" because it will
> hand out IP addresses to whoever asks, without regard to the contents
> of its NetInfo "/machines" database.)  The configuration being
> incomplete, the boot process failed.

MacOS X supports something called Rendezvous or ZeroConf and Bonjour, which 
can be used for network configuration and service location even in the event 
that no DHCP server is available, or even if the network isn't using IP at 
all, but AppleTalk, or NetBIOS/NetBEUI, or something wacky like that.

However, if the network has been configured by a human admin via DHCP or 
whatever (AppleTalk, NetInfo, YP/NIS, etc), those settings will take priority 
over the auto-assigned 169.254/16 addresses ZeroConf uses.

-- 
-Chuck