IP Networking

How can UNIX systems obtain IP addresses? Can it obtain from Win 2000 Server, DHCP service, dynamically?

You can configure a UNIX machine to get it's IP address from a DHCP server. In each flavour of UNIX there is a file which details hostname information as well as info relating to the ip address, subnet mask, broadcast address etc for each NIC card. In HP-UX this is the netconf file.

Each entry for each NIC card should have a DHCP enable function which you can set. That interface will then obtain it's IP address from the DHCP server either as the machine boots up, or you can restart network services to have it pick it up. This is on the UNIX side of things, I'm not sure how the Win 2k server would be configured, but I assume it would pretty self explanatory.

One thing to take into consideration is that unless you add more complex rules to IP address allocation on the DHCP server (such as range address allocation) DHCP is not entirely suited to a server since clients generally connect on one or two IP addresses, which is not good if those are constantly in flux. However DHCP can be tightened down, as I suggested, to hand over a certain range IP addresses to certain machines. Take a look at this.

Hope this helps.

Regards.