IPALLOCD(8C)

NAME
ipallocd - Ethernet-to-IP address allocator

SYNOPSIS
/usr/etc/rpc.ipallocd

AVAILABILITY

Available only on Sun 386i systems running a SunOS 4.0.x release or earlier. Not a SunOS 4.1 release feature.

DESCRIPTION

ipallocd is a daemon that determines or temporarily allocates IP addresses within a network segment. The service is only available on the system which is home to the address authority for the network segment, currently the Network Information Service (NIS) master of the hosts.byaddr map although the service is not tied to the NIS service. It has complete knowledge of the hosts listed in the NIS service, and, if the system is running the name server, of any hosts listed in internet domain tables automatically accessed on that host through the standard library gethostent(3N) call.

This protocol uses DES authentication (the Sun Secure RPC protocol) to restrict access to this function. The only clients privileged to allocate addresses are those whose net IDs are in the networks group. For machine IDs, the machine must be an NIS server.

The daemon uses permanent entries in the /etc/ethers and /etc/hosts files when they exist and are usable. In other cases, such as when a system is new to the network, ipallocd enters a temporary mapping in a local cache. Entries in the cache are removed when there have been no references to a given entry in the last hour. This cache survives system crashes so that IP addresses remain consistent.

The daemon also provides corresponding IP address to name mapping.

If the file /etc/ipalloc.netrange exists, ipallocd refuses to allocate addresses on networks not listed in the netrange file, or for which no free address is available.

FILES
/etc/ipalloc.cache
    temporary cache
/etc/ipalloc.netrange
    optional file to allocate network addresses

SEE ALSO
ipalloc(3R), pnp(3R), ipalloc.netrange(5), ipallocd(8C), netconfig(8C), pnpboot(8C), rarpd(8C)

NOTES
The Network Information Service (NIS) was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP). The functionality of the two remains the same; only the name has changed.