What is Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA)
The default configuration on most TCP/IP based operating systems is to dynamically obtain an IP address configuration from a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server. When the DHCP server is not available for some reason, the computer can assign itself an IP address automatically.
The automatically assigned address is from the range (169.254.0.0) to (169.254.255.255) and a subnet mask of (255.255.0.0.)
With an APIPA address, the computer can connect only to the other computers with an APIPA address on the local network segment but cannot access any other computers on a remote network. If a computer is configured to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server but does not support APIPA, its IP address defaults to 0.0.0.0.
The automatically assigned address is from the range (169.254.0.0) to (169.254.255.255) and a subnet mask of (255.255.0.0.)
With an APIPA address, the computer can connect only to the other computers with an APIPA address on the local network segment but cannot access any other computers on a remote network. If a computer is configured to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server but does not support APIPA, its IP address defaults to 0.0.0.0.