Dynamic IP

A dynamic IP address is automatically configured and can change without user intervention.

A dynamic IP address is usually assigned by DHCP during startup. On a Linux system, this occurs when the system is switching to multi-user mode after the kernel boots. A host requests an IP address and receives a 'lease' from the DHCP server.

Dynamic IP addresses have the advantage that a central server maintains control over address allocation, avoiding the wasted address space common to static addressing schemes. The disadvantage is that an additional point of failure is introduced to the network, because when the dynamic addresses expire, if the server is not available to renew them, communication grinds to a halt. In practice this is not a problem.